The Portable Chekhov

"What a lot of houses!"

"That's nothing," said the medical student. "In Lon- don there are ten times as many. There are about a hundred thousand such women there."

The cabmen were sitting on their boxes as calmly and indifferently as in any other side street; there were passers-by on the sidewalks as in other streets. No one was hurrying, no one was hiding his face in his coat- collar, no one shook his head reproachfully. . . . And in this indifference, in the mingled sounds of pianos and violins, in the bright windows and wide-open doors, there was something immodest, insolent, reckless, and extravagant. Probably it was as gay and noisy at the slave-markets in their day, and people's faces and gait showed the same indifference.

"Let us begin from the beginning," said the artist.

The friends went into a narrow passage lighted by a lamp with a reflector. When they opened the door a man in a black coat, with an unshaven face like a flunkey's, and sleepy-looking eyes, got up lazily from a yellow sofa in the hall. The place smelled like a laundry with an odor of vinegar in addition. A door from the hall led into a brightly lighted room. The medical stu- dent and the artist stopped at this door and, craning their necks, peeped into the room.

"Buona sera, signori, rigolleto—hugenotti—traviatal" began the artist, with a theatrical bow.

"Havanna—tarakano—pistoletol" said the medical student, pressing his cap to his breast and bowing low.

Vasilyev was standing behind them. He would have liked to make a theatrical bow and say something silly, too, but he only smiled, felt an awkwardness that was like shame, and waited impatiently for what would happen next.

A little blond girl of seventeen or eighteen, with bobbed hair, in a short light-blue frock with a white bow on her bosom, appeared in the doorway.

"Why do you stand at the door?" she said. "Take off your coats and come into the drawing-room."

The medical student and the artist, still talking Ital- ian, went into the drawing-room. Vasilyev followed them irresolutely.

"Gentlemen, take off your coats!" the flunkey said sternly; "you can't go in like that."

In the drawing-room there was, besides the girl, an- other woman, very stout and tall, with a foreign face and bare arms. She was sitting near the piano, laying out a game of patience on her lap. She took no notice whatever of the visitors.

''Where are the other young ladies?" asked the medi- cal student.

"They are having their tea," said the blonde. "Stepan," she called, "go and tell the young ladies some students have come!"

A little later a third young lady came into the room. She was wearing a bright red dress with blue stripes. Her face was painted thickly and unskillfully, her brow was hidden under her hair, and there was an unblink- ing, frightened stare in her eyes. As she came in, she began at once singing some song in a coarse, powerful contralto. After her a fourth appeared, and a fifth. . . .

In all this Vasilyev saw nothing novel or interesting. It seemed to him that this room, the piano, the looking- glass in its cheap gilt frame, the bow, the dress with the blue stripes, and the blank indifferent faces, he had seen before and more than once. Of the darkness, the silence,

the secrecy, the guilty smile, of all that he had expected

to meet here and had dreaded, he saw no trace.

Everything was ordinary, prosaic, and uninteresting. Only one thing faintly stirred his curiosity—the terrible, as it were intentional, bad taste which was visible in the cornices, in the absurd pictures, in the dresses, in the sash. There was something characteristic and peculiar in this bad taste.

"How poor and stupid it all is!" thought Vasilyev. "What is there in all this trumpery I see now that can tempt a normal man and excite him to commit the hor- rible sin of buying a human being for a ruble? I under- stand any sin for the sake of splendor, beauty, grace, passion, taste; but what is there here? What is there here worth sinning for? But ... I mustn't think!"

"Beardy, treat me to some porter!" said the blonde, addressing him.

Vasilyev was at once overcome with embarrassment.

'With pleasure," he said, boWing politely. "Only ex- cuse me, madam, I ... I won't drink with you. I don't drink."

Five minutes later the friends went off into another house.

"Why did you ask for porter?" said the medical stu- dent angrily. "What a millionaire! You have thrown away six rubles for no reason whatever—simply waste!"

"If she wants it, why not let her have the pleasure?" said Vasilyev, justifying himself.

"You did not give pleasure to her, but to the madam. They are told to ask the visitors to stand them treat be- cause it is a profit to the house."

"Behold the mill . • ." hummed the artist, "in ruins now. . . ."

Entering the next house, the friends stopped in the hall and did not go into the drawing-room. Here, as in the first house, a figure in a black coat, with a sleepy face like a flunkey's, got up from a sofa in the hall. Looking at this flunkey, at his face and his shabby black coat, Vasilyev thought: "What must an ordinary simple Russian have gone through before Fate flung him down as a flunkey here? Where had he been before and what had he done? What was awaiting him? Was he married? Where was his mother, and did she know that he was employed here as a flunkey?" And Vasilyev took par- ticular notice of the flunkey in each house. In one of the houses—he thought it was the fourth—there was a little spare, frail-looking flunkey with a watch-chain on his waistcoat. He was reading a newspaper, and took no notice of them when they came in. Looking at his face Vasilyev, for some reason, thought that a man with such a face might steal, might murder, might bear false wit- ness. But the face was really^interesting: a big forehead, gray eyes, a little flattened nose, thin compressed lips, and a blankly stupid and at the same time insolent ex- pression like that of a young harrier overtaking a hare. Vasilyev thought it would be well to touch this man's hair, to see whether it was soft or coarse. It must be coarse like a dog's.

DI

Having drunk two glasses of porter, the artist became suddenly tipsy and grew unnaturally lively.

"Let's go to another!" he said peremptorily, waving his arms. "I will take you to the best one."

When he had brought his friends to the house which in his opinion was the best, he declared his firm intention of dancing a quadrille. The medical student grumbled something about their having to pay the musicians a ruble, but agreed to be his vis-a-vis. They began dancing.

It was just as nasty in the best house as in the worst.

Here there were just the same looking-glasses and pic- tures, the same styles of coiffure and dress. Looking round at the furnishing of the rooms and the costumes, Vasilyev realized that this was not lack of taste, but something that might be called the taste, and even the

style, of S Street, which could not be found else-

where—something integral in its ugliness, not acciden- tal, but elaborated in the course of years. After he had been in eight houses he was no longer surprised at the color of the dresses, at the long trains, the gaudy bows, the sailor dresses, and the thick purplish rouge on the cheeks; he saw that it all had to be like this, that if a single one of the women had been dressed like a human being, or if there had been one decent engraving on the wall, the general tone of the whole street would have suffered.

"How unskillfully they seU themselves!" he thought. "How can they fail to understand that vice is only allur- ing when it is beautiful and hidden, when it wears the mask of virtue? Modest black dresses, pale faces, mourn- ful smiles, and darkness would be far more effective than this clumsy tinsel. Stupid things! If they don't un- derstand it of themselves, their visitors might surely have taught them. . . ."

A young lady in a Polish dress edged with white fur came up to him and sat down beside him.

"You nice dark man, why aren't you dancing?" she asked. "Why are you so duU?"

"Because it is dull."

"Treat me to some Lafitte. Then it won't be dull."

Vasilyev made no answer. He was silent for a little, and then asked:

"What time do you get to sleep?"

"At six o'clock."

"And what time do you get up?"

"Sometimes at two and sometimes at three."

"And what do you do when you get up?"

"We have coffee, and at six o'clock we have dinner."

"And what do you have for dinner?"

"Usually soup, beefsteak, and dessert. Our madam keeps the girls well. But why do you ask all this?"

"Oh, just to talk. . . ."

Vasilyev longed to talk to the young lady about many things. He felt an intense desire to find out where she came from, whether her parents were living, and whether they knew that she was here; how she had come into this house; whether she was cheerful and satisfied, or sad and oppressed by gloomy thoughts; whether she hoped some day to get out of her present position. . . . But he could not think how to begin or in what shape to put his questions so as not to seem impertinent. He thought for a long time, and asked:

"How old are you?"

"Eighty," the young lady jested, looking with a laugh at the antics of the artist as he danced.

All at once she burst out laughing at something, and uttered a long cynical sentence loud enough to be heard by everyone. Vasilyev was aghast, and not knowing what kind of a face to put on the matter, gave a con- strained smile. He was the only one who smiled; all the others, his friends, the musicians, the women, did not even glance towards his neighbor, but seemed not to have heard her.

"Stand me some Lafitte," his neighbor said again.

Vasilyev felt a repulsion for her white fur and for her voice, and walked away from her. It seemed to him hot and stifling, and his heart began pounding slowly but violently, like a hammer—one! two! three!

"Let us go away!" he said, pulling the artist by his sleeve.

"Wait a little; let me finish."

While the artist and the medical student were finish- ing the quadrille, to avoid looking at the women, Va- silyev scrutinized the musicians. A respectable-looking old man in spectacles, rather like Marshal Bazaine, was playing the piano; a young man with a fair beard, dressed in the latest fashion, was playing the violin. The young man had a face that did not look stupid or hollow-cheeked, but intelligent, youthful, and fresh. He was dressed fancifully and with taste; he played with feeling. It was a mystery how he and the respectable- looking old man had got here. How was it they were not ashamed to sit here? What were they thinking about when they looked at the women?

If the violin and the piano had been played by men in rags, hungry, gloomy, drunken, with dissipated or stupid faces, then one could have understood their pres- ence, perhaps. As it was, Vasilyev was at a loss to un- derstand it. He recalled the story of the fallen woman he had once read, and he thought now that that human image with the guilty smile had nothing in common with what he was seeing now. It seemed to him that he was seeing not fallen women, but beings belonging to a different world quite apart, alien to him and incompre- hensible; if he had seen this world before on the stage, or read of it in a book, he would not have believed it could exist.

The woman with the white fur burst out laughing again and uttered a loathsome phrase in a loud voice. A feeling of disgust took possession of him. He blushed and went out of the room.

'Wait a minute, we are coming tool" the artist shouted to him.

IV

'While we were dancing," said the medical student, as they all three went out into the street, "I had a con- versation with my partner. We talked about her first romance. He, the hero, was an accountant at Smolensk with a wife and five children. She was seventeen, and she lived with her papa and mamma, who sold soap and candles."

"How did he win her heart?" asked Vasilyev.

"By spending fifty rubles on underwear for her. What the devil!"

"So he knew how to get his partner's story out of her," thought Vasilyev about the medical student. "But I don't know how."

"Gentlemen, I am going home!" he said.

"What for?"

"Because I don't know how to behave here. Besides, I am bored, disgusted. What is there amusing in it? If they were human beings—but they are savages and animals. I am going; do as you like."

"Come, Grisha, Grigory, darling . • ." said the artist in a tearful voice, hugging Vasilyev, "come along! Let's go to one more together and damnation take them! . . . Please do, Grisha!"

They persuaded Vasilyev and led him up a staircase. In the carpet and the gilt banisters, in the doorman who opened the door, and in the panels that decorated the

hall, the same S Street style was apparent, but

carried to a greater perfection, more imposing.

"I really will go home!" said Vasilyev as he was tak- ing off his coat.

"Come, come, dear boy," said the artist, and he kissed him on the neck. "Don't be tiresome. . . . Gri- gri, be a good comrade! We came together, we will go

back together. What a beast you are, really!"

"I can wait for you in the street. I think it's loathsome here, really!"

"Come, come, Grisha. . . . If it is loathsome, ob- serve it! Do you understand? Observe!"

"One must take an objective view of things," said the medical student gravely.

Vasilyev went into the drawing-ro^ and sat do^. There were a number of visitors in the room besides him and his friends: two infantry officers, a bald, gray- haired gentleman in spectacles, two beardless youths from the Institute of Surveying, and a very tipsy man who looked like an actor. All the young ladies were taken up with these visitors and paid no attention to Vasilyev.

Only one of them, dressed a la Aida, glanced side- ways at him, smiled, and said, yawning: "A dark one has come. . . ."

Vasilyev's heart was pounding and his face burned. He felt ashamed before these visitors of his presence here, and he felt disgusted and miserable. He was tor- mented by the thought that he, a decent and affection- ate person (such as he had hitherto considered him- self), hated these women and felt only repelled by them. He felt pity neither for the women nor the musi- cians nor the flunkeys.

"It is because I am not trying to understand them," he thought. "They are all more like animals than human beings, but of course they are human beings all the same, they have souls. One must understand them and then judge. . . ."

"Grisha, don't go, wait for us," the artist shouted to him and disappeared.

The medical student disappeared soon after.

"Yes, one must make an effort to understand, one mustn't be like this . . ." Vasilyev went on thinking.

And he began gazing at each of the women with strained attention, looking for a guilty smile. But either he did not know how to read their faces, or not one of these women felt guilty; he read on every face nothing but a blank expression of everyday vulgar boredom and complacency. Stupid faces, stupid smiles, harsh, stupid voices, insolent movements, and nothing else. Appar- ently each of them had in the past a romance with an accountant based on fifty rubles' worth of underwear, and looked for no other delights in the present but coffee, a dinner of three courses, wines, quadrilles, sleep- ing till two in the afternoon. . . .

Finding no guilty smile, Vasilyev began to look round to see if there were one intelligent face. And his atten- tion was caught by one pale, rather sleepy, tired-looking face. . . . It was a brunette, not very young, wearing a dress covered with spangles; she sat in an easy-chair, looking at the floor and lost in thought. Vasilyev walked from one corner of the room to the other, and, as though casually, sat down beside her.

"I must begin with something trivial," he thought, "and pass to what is serious. . . ."

"What a pretty dress you have," and with his finger he touched the gold fringe of her fichu.

"Oh, is it? . . ." said the dark woman listlessly.

''What province do you come from?"

"I? From a distance. . . . From Chernigov."

"A fine province. It's nice there."

"Any place seems nice when one is not in it."

"It's a pity I cannot describe nature," thought Vasil- yev. "I might touch her by a description of nature in Chernigov. No doubt she loves the place if she was born there."

"Are you dull here?'' he asked.

"Of course I am dull."

'Why don't you go away from here if you are dull?"

'Where should I go to? Go begging or what?"

"Begging would be easier than living here."

"How do you know that? Have you begged?"

"Yes, when I hadn't the money to study. Even if I hadn't, anyone could understand that. A beggar is any- way a free man, and you are a slave."

The brunette stretched, and with sleepy eyes watched the footman who was carrying a trayful of glasses and soda water.

"Stand me a glass of porter," she said, and yawned again.

"Porter," thought Vasilyev. "And what if your brother or mother walked in at this moment? What would you say? And what would they say? There would be porter then, I imagine. • . ."

All at once there was the sound of weeping. From the adjoining room, to which the footman had taken the soda water, a fair-haired man with a red face and angry eyes ran rapidly. He was followed by the tall, stout madam, who was shouting in a shrill voice:

"Nobody has given you leave to slap girls on the cheeks! We have visitors better than you, and they don't fight! You fourflusherl"

A hubb-ib arose. Vasilyev was frightened and turned pale. In the next room there was the sound of bitter, genuine weeping, as though of someone insulted. And he realized that there were real people living here who, like people everywhere else, felt insulted, suffered, wept, and cried for help. The feeling of choking hate and disgust gave way to an acute feeling of pity and anger against the aggressor. He rushed into the room where there was weeping. Across rows of bottles on a marble-top table he distinguished a suffering face, wet with tears, stretched out his hands towards that face, took a step towards the table, but at once drew back in horror. The weeping woman was drunk.

As he made his way through the noisy crowd gathered about the fair-haired man, his heart sank and he felt frightened like a child; and it seemed to him that in this alien, incomprehensible world people wanted to pursue him, to beat him, to pelt him with filthy words. . . . He tore down his coat from the hanger and ran headlong downstairs.

v

Pressed against the fence, he stood near the house waiting for his friends to come out. The sounds of the pianos and violins, gay, reckless, insolent, and mourn- ful, mingled in the air in a sort of chaos, and this tangle of sounds seemed again like an unseen orchestra tuning up on the roofs. If one looked upwards into the darkness, the black background was all spangled with white, moving specks: it was snow falling. As the snow- flakes came into the light they floated round lazily in the air like down, and still more lazily fell to the ground. The snowflakes whirled thickly round Vasilyev and hung upon his beard, his eyelashes, his eyebrows. . . . The cabmen, the horses, and the passers-by were white.

"And how can the snow fall in this street!" thought Vasilyev. "Damnation take these houses!"

His legs seemed to be giving way from fatigue, simply from having run down the stairs; he gasped for breath as though he had been climbing uphill, his heart beat so loudly that he could hear it. He was consumed by a desire to get out of the street as quickly as possible and to go home, but even stronger was his desire to wait for his companions and vent upon them his op- pressive feeling.

There was much he did not understand about these houses, the souls of ruined women were a mystery to him as before; but it was clear to him that the situation was far worse than could have been believed. If that sinful woman who had poisoned herself was called fallen, it was difficult to find a fitting name for all these who were dancing now to this tangle of sound and uttering long, loathsome sentences. They were not on the road to ruin, but ruined.

"There is vice," he thought, "but neither conscious- ness of sin nor hope of salvation. People sell and buy them, drown them in wine and steep them in abomina- tions, while, like sheep, they are stupid, indifferent, and don't understand. My God!My God!"

It was clear to him, too, that everything that is called human dignity, personality, the divine image and like- ness, was defiled to the uttermost and that not only the street and the stupid women were responsible for it.

A group of students, white with snow, passed him, laughing and talking gaily; one, a tall thin fellow, stopped, glanced at Vasilyev's face, and said in a drunken voice:

"One of us! A bit high, old man? Aha-ha! Never mind, have a good time! Don't be downhearted, old chap!"

He took Vasilyev by the shoulders and pressed his cold wet mustaches against his cheek, then he slipped, staggered, and, waving both hands, cried:

"Hold on! Don't tumble!"

And laughing, he ran to overtake his companions.

Through the noise came the sound of the artist's voice:

"Don't you dare to hit womenl I won't let you, dam- nation take you! You scoundrels!"

The medical student appeared in the doorway. He looked from side to side, and seeing Vasilyev, said in an agitated voice:

"You here! I tell you it's really impossible to go any- where with Yegor! What a fellow he is! I don't under- stand him! He has got up a scenel Do you hear? Yegor!" he shouted at the door. 'Tegor!"

"I won't allow you to hit women!" the artist's piercing voice sounded from above. Something heavy and lum- bering rolled down the stairs. It was the artist falling headlong. Evidently he had been pushed downstairs.

He picked himself up from the ground, shook his hat, and, with an angry and indignant face, brandished his fist towards the top of the stairs and shouted:

"Scoundrels! Torturers! Bloodsuckersl I won't allow you to hit them! To hit a weak, drunken woman! Oh,

n

you . . .

"Yegor! . . . Come, Yegor! . . ." the medical stu- dent began imploring him. "I give you my word of honor I'll never come with you again. On my word of honor I won't!"

Little by little the artist was pacified and the friends went homewards.

"Against my will an unknown force," hummed the medical student, "has led me to these mournful shores."

" 'Behold the mill,' " the artist chimed in a little later, " 'in ruins now.' What a lot of snow, Holy Mother! Grisha, why did you go? You are a coward, a regular old woman."

Vasilyev walked behind his companions, looked at their backs, and thought:

"One of two things: either we only fancy prostitution is an evil, and we exaggerate it; or, if prostitution really is as great an evil as is generally assumed, these dear friends of mine are as much slave-owners, ravishers, and murderers, as the inhabitants of Syria and Cairo, that are described in Niva. Now they are singing, laughing, talking sense, but haven't they just been exploiting hunger, ignorance, and stupidity? They have—1 have been a witness of it. What is the use of their humanity, their medicine, their painting? The science, art, and lofty sentiments of these assassins remind me of the piece of bacon in the story. Two brigands murdered a beggar in a forest; they began sharing his clothes be- tween them, and found in his wallet a piece of bacon. 'Well found,' said one of them; 'let us have a bit.' 'What do you mean? How can you?' cried the other in horror. 'Have you forgotten that today is Wednesday?' And they would not eat it. After murdering a man, they came out of the forest in the firm conviction that they were good Christians. In the same way these men, after buying women, go their way imagining that they are artists and men of science. . . ."

"Listen!" he said sharply and angrily. "Why do you come here? Is it possible—is it possible you don't under- stand how horrible it is? Your medical books tell you that every one of these women dies prematurely of consumption or something; art tells you that morally they are dead even earlier. Every one of them dies be- cause she has in her time to entertain five hundred men on an average, let us say. Each one of them is killed by five hundred men. You are among those five hun- dred! If each of you -in the course of your life visits this place or others like it two hundred and fifty times, it follows that one woman is killed by every two of you! Can't you understand that? Isn't it horrible for two of you, three of you, five of you, to murder a foolish, hungry woman! Ah! isn't it awful, my God!"

"I knew it would end like that," the artist said frown- ing. 'We ought not to have gone with this fool and ass! You imagine you have grand notions in your head now, ideas, don't you? No, it's the devil knows what, but not ideas. You are looking at me now with hatred and re- pulsion, but I tell you it's better you should set up twenty more houses like those than look like that. There's more vice in your look than in the whole street! Come along, Volodya, let him go to the devill He's a fool and an ass, and that's all. . . ."

"We human beings do murder each other," said the medical student. "It's immoral, of course, but philoso- phizing won't help it. Good-by!"

At Trubnoy Square the friends said good-by and parted. When he was left alone, Vasilyev strode rapidly along the boulevard. He felt frightened of the darkness, of the snow which was falling in heavy flakes on the ground and seemed as though it would cover up the whole world; he felt frightened of the street lamps glimmering feebly through the clouds of snow. His soul was possessed by an unaccountable, faint-hearted ter- ror. Passers-by came towards him from time to time, but he timidly edged away; it seemed to him that women, none but women, were coming from all sides and rtar- ing at him. . . .

"It's beginning," he thought, "I am going to have an attack of nerves."

VI

At home he lay on his bed and said, shuddering all over: "They are alive! Alive! My God, those women are alive!"

He stimulated his imagination in all sorts ofways; he pictured himself the brother of a fallen woman, or her

father, then a fallen woman herself, with her painted

cheeks; and it all moved him to horror.

It seemed to him that he must settle the question at once at all costs, and that this question was not one that did not concern him, but was his own personal problem. He made an immense effort, repressed his despair, and, sitting on the bed, holding his head in his hands, began thinking how one could save all the women he had seen that day. The method for attacking problems of all kinds was, as he was an educated man, well known to him. And however excited he was, he strictly adhered to that method. He recalled the history of the problem and its literature, and for a quarter of an hour paced from one end of the room to the other trying to remember all the methods for saving women employed at the present time. He had very many good friends and acquaintances who lived in rooming-houses. Among them were a good many honest and self-sacri- ficing men. Some of them had attempted to save women. . . .

"All these not very numerous attempts," thought Va- silyev, "can be divided into three groups. Some, after buying the woman out of the brothel, took a room for her, bought her a sewing-machine, and she became a seamstress. And whether he wanted to or not, after having bought her out he made her his mistress; then when he had taken his degree, he went away and handed her into the keeping of some other decent man as though she were a thing. And the fallen woman re- mained a fallen woman. Others, after buying her out, took a lodging apart for her, bought the inevitable sewing-machine, and tried teaching her to read, preach- ing at her, and giving her books. The woman stayed and sewed as long as it was interesting and a novelty to her, then getting bored, began receiving men on the sly, or ran away Ј»nd went back where she could sleep till three o'clock, drink coffee, and have good dinners. Finally, those who were most ardent and self-sacrificing took a bold, resolute step: they married the woman. And when the insolent and spoiled, or stupid and crushed animal became a wife, the head of a household, and afterwards a mother, it turned her whole existence and attitude to life upside do^, so that it was hard to recognize the fallen woman afterwards in the wife and the mother. Yes, marriage was the best and perhaps the only means."

"But it is impossible!" Vasilyev said aloud, and he sank upon his bed. "1, to begin with, could not marry one! To do that one must be a saint and be unable to feel hatred or repulsion. But let us suppose that I, the medical student, and the artist mastered ourselves and did marry them—suppose they were all married. What would be the result? The result would be that while here in Moscow they were being married, some Smo- lensk accountant would be debauching another lot, and that lot would be streaming here to fill the vacant places, together with others from Saratov, Nizhni-Nov- gorod, Warsaw. . . . And what is one to do with the hundred thousand in London? What's one to do with those in Hamburg?"

The lamp in which the oil had burnt do^ began to smoke. Vasilyev did not notice it. He began pacing to and fro again, still thinking. Now he put the question differently: what must be done that fallen women should not be needed? For that, it was essential that the men who buy and kill them should feel all the immorality of their share in enslaving them and should be horrified. One must save the men.

"Art and science are of no use here, that is clear . . ." thought Vasilyev. "The only way out of it is missionary work."

And he began to dream how the next evening he would stand at the comer of the street and say to every passer-by: "Where are you going and what for? Have the fear of God!"

He would tum to the apathetic cabmen and say to them: "Why are you staying here? Why aren't you re- volted? Why aren't you indignant? I suppose you be- lieve in God and know that it is a sin, that people go to hell for it? Why don't you speak? True, they are strangers to you, but you know even they have fathers, brothers, who are just like yourselves. . . ,"

One of Vasilyev's friends had once said of him that he was a talented man. There are aU sorts of talents— talent for writing, talent for the stage, talent for art; but he had a peculiar talent—a talent for humanity. He possessed an extraordinarily fine delicate scent for pain in general. As a good actor reflects in himself the move- ments and voice of others, so Vasilyev could reflect in his soul the sufferings of others. When he saw tears, he wept; beside a sick man, he felt sick himself and moaned; if he saw an act of violence, he felt as though he himself were the victim of it, he was frightened as a child, and in his fright ran to help. The pain of others worked On his nerves, excited him, roused him to a state of frenzy, and so on.

Whether this friend were right I don't know, but what Vasilyev experienced when he thought this ques- tion was settled was something like inspiration. He cried and laughed, spoke aloud the words that he should say next day, felt a fervent love for those who would listen to ^rn and would stand beside him at the comer of the street to preach; he sat down to write letters, made vows to himself. . . .

All this was like inspiration also in that it did not last long. Vasilyev soon grew tired. The mass of the cases in London, in Hamburg, in Warsaw, weighed upon him as a mountain weighs upon the earth; he felt dispirited, bewildered, in the face of this mass; he re- membered that he was no speaker, that he was cowardly and timid, that indifferent people were unlikely to be willing to listen and understand him, a law student in his third year, a timid and insignificant person, that genuine missionary work meant not only preaching but deeds. . . .

When it was daylight and carriages were already beginning to rumble in the street, Vasilyev was lying motionless on the sofa, staring into space. He was no longer thinking of the women, nor of the men, nor of missionary work. His whole attention was turned upon the mental agony which was torturing him. It was a dull, vague, indefinite pain akin to anguish, to an ex- treme form of terror, and to despair. He could point to the place where the pain was: in his chest under his heart; but he could not compare it with anything. In the past he had had acute toothache, he had had pleurisy and neuralgia, but all that was insignificant compared with this mental anguish. In the presence of this pain life seemed loathsome. The dissertation, the excellent work he' had written already, the people he loved, the salvation of fallen women—everything that only the day before he had cared about or been indifferent to, now when he thought of it irritated him in the same way as the noise of the carriages, the scurrying footsteps of the waiters in the passage, the daylight. . . . If at that moment someone had performed a great deed of mercy or had committed a revolting outrage, he would have felt the same repulsion for both actions. Of all the thoughts that strayed through his mind only two did not irritate him: one was that at every moment he had the power to kill himself, the other was that this agony would not last more than three days. This last he knew by experience.

After lying for a while he got up and, wringing his hands, paced the room, not as usual from corner to corner, but round the room along the walls. As he passed he glanced at himself in the looking-glass. His face looked pale and thin, his temples hollow, his eyes were bigger, darker, more staring, as though they be- longed to someone else, and they had an expression of intolerable mental agony.

At midday the artist knocked at the door.

"Grigory, are you at home?" he asked.

Getting no answer, he stood for a minute, pondered, and answered himself in Ukrainian: "Not there. The confounded fellow has gone to the university."

And he went away. Vasilyev lay down on the bed and, thrusting his head under the pillow, began crying with agony, and the more freely his tears flowed the more terrible his mental anguish became. As it began to get dark, he thought of the agonizing night awaiting him, and was overcome by horrible despair. He dressed quickly, ran out of his room, and, leaving his door wide open, for no object or reason went out into the street. Without asking himself where he should go, he walked quickly along Sadovaya Street.

Snow was falling as heavily as the day before; it was thawing. Thrusting his hands into his sleeves, shudder- ing and frightened by the noises, the street car bells, and the passers-by, Vasilyev walked along Sadovaya Street as far as Suharev Tower; then to the Red Gate;

from there he turned off to Basmannaya Street. He went into a tavern and drank off a big glass of vodka, but that did not make him feel better. When he reached Raz- gulyay he turned to the right, and strode along side streets in which he had never been before in his life. He reached the old bridge under which the Yauza runs gurgling and from which one can see long rows of lights in the windows of the Red Barracks. To counter- act his mental anguish by some new sensation or some other pain, Vasilyev, not knowing what to do, crying and shuddering, undid his overcoat and jacket and ex- posed his bare chest to the wet snow and the wind. But that did not lessen his suffering either. Then he bent down over the rail of the bridge and looked down into the black, yeasty Yauza, and he longed to plunge down head-foremost; not out of loathing for life, not for the sake of suicide, but in order to bruise himself at least, and by one pain ease the other. But the black water, the darkness, the deserted banks covered with snow were terrifying. He shivered and walked on. He walked up and down by the Red Barracks, then turned back and went down to a copse, from the copse back to the bridge again.

"No, home, home!" he thought. "At home I believe it's better. . . ."

And he went back. When he reached home he pulled off his wet overcoat and cap, began pacing round the room, and went on pacing round and round without stopping till morning.

VII

When next morning the artist and the medical stu- dent went in to him, he was tossing about the room with his shirt torn, biting his hands, and moaning with pain.

"For God's sake!" he sobbed when he saw his friends, "take me where you please, do what you can; but for God's sake, save me quickly! I shall kill myself!"

The artist turned pale and lost his head. The medical student, too, almost cried, but considering that doctors ought to be cool and composed in every emergency, said coldly:

"It's an attack of nerves. But it's nothing. Let us go at once to the doctor."

"Wherever you like, only for God's sake, make haste!"

"Don't excite yourself. You must try and control your- self."

The artist and the medical student with trembling hands dressed Vasilyev and led him out into the street.

"Mihail Sergeyich has been wanting to make your acquaintance for a long time," the medical student said on the way. "He is a very nice man and thoroughly good at his work. He took his degree in 1882, and he has an immense practice already. He treats students as though he were one himself."

"Make haste, make haste! . . ." Vasilyev urged.

Mihail Sergeyich, a stout, fair-haired doctor, received the friends with politeness and frigid dignity, and smiled only on one side of his face.

"Rybnikov and Meier have spoken to me of your il- ness already," he said. "Very glad to be of service to you. Well? Sit down, I beg you."

He made Vasilyev sit down in a big armchair near the desk, and moved a box of cigarettes towards him.

"Now then!" he began, stroking his knees. "Let us get to work. . . . How old are you?"

He asked questions and the medical student an- swered them. He asked whether Vasilyev's father had suffered from certain special diseases, whether he drank to excess, whether he was remarkable for cruelty or any peculiarities. He made similar inquiries about his grand- father, mother, sisters, and brothers. On learning that his mother had a beautiful voice and sometimes acted on the stage, he suddenly grew more animated, and asked :

"Excuse me, but do you perhaps remember if your mother's interest in the stage was a passionate one?"

Twenty minutes passed. Vasilyev was annoyed by the way the doctor kept stroking his knees and talking of the same thing.

"So far as I understand your questions, doctor," he said, "you want to know whether my illness is heredi- tary or not. It is not."

The doctor proceeded to ask Vasilyev whether he had had any secret vices as a boy, or had received injuries to his head; whether he had had any aberrations, any peculiarities, or exceptional propensities. Half the ques- tions usually asked by doctors of their patients can be left unanswered without the slightest ill effect on the health, but Mihail Sergeyich, the medical student, and the artist all looked as though if Vasilyev failed to an- swer one question all would be lost. As he received answers, the doctor for some reason noted them down on a slip of paper. On learning that Vasilyev had taken his degree in the natural sciences and was now studying law, the doctor grew thoughtful.

"He wrote an excellent thesis last year, . . ." said the medical student.

"I beg your pardon, but don't interrupt me; you're preventing me from concentrating," said the doctor, and he smiled on one side of his face. "Though, of course, that does enter into the case history. Intense intellectual work, nervous exhaustion. . . . Yes, yes. . . . And do you drink vodka?" he said, addressing Vasilyev.

"Very rarely."

Another twenty minutes passed. The medical student began telling the doctor in a low voice his opinion as to the immediate cause of the attack, and related how the day before yesterday the artist, Vasilyev, and he had visited S Street.

The indifferent, reserved, and frigid tone in which his friends and the doctor spoke of the women and that miserable street struck Vasilyev as strange in the extreme. • . .

"Doctor, tell me one thing only," he said, controlling himself so as not to speak rudely. "Is prostitution an evil or not?"

"My dear fellow, who disputes it?" said the doctor, with an expression that suggested that he had settled all such questions for himself long ago. "Who disputes it?"

"You are a psychiatrist, aten't you?" Vasilyev asked curtly.

"Yes, a psychiatrist."

"Perhaps all of you are right!" said Vasilyev, get- ting up and beginning to walk from one end of the room to the other. "Perhaps! But it all seems amazing to me! That I should have taken my degree in two faculties you look upon as a great achievement; because I have writ- ten a thesis which in three years will be thro^ aside and forgotten, I am praised up to the skies; but because I cannot speak of fallen women as unconcernedly as oi these chairs, I am being examined by a doctor, I am called mad, I am pitied!"

Vasilyev for some reason suddenly felt unutterably sorry for himself, for his companions, for all the people he had seen two days before, and for the doctor; he burst into tears and sank into a chair.

His friends looked inquiringly at the doctor. The lat- ter, with the air of completely comprehending the tears and the despair, of feeling himself a specialist in that line, went up to Vasilyev and, without a word, gave him some medicine to drink; and then, when he was calmer, undressed him and began to investigate the degree of sensibility of the skin, the reflex action of the knees, and so on.

And Vasilyev felt easier. When he came out from the doctor's office he was beginning to feel ashamed; the rattle of the carriages no longer irritated him, and the load under his heart grew lighter and lighter as though it were melting away. He had two prescriptions in his hand: one was for bromide, the other for morphine. . . . He had taken all these remedies before!

In the street he stood still for a while and, saying good-by to his friends, dragged himself languidly to the university.

1888

Gusev

_I

T IS already dark, it will soon be night.

Gusev, a discharged private, half rises in his bunk and says in a low voice:

"Do you hear me, Pavel Ivanych? A soldier in Suchan was telling me: while they were sailing, their ship bumped into a big fish and smashed a hole in its bot- tom."

The individual of uncertain social status whom he is addressing, and whom everyone in the ship infirmary calls Pavel lvanych, is silent as though he hasn't heard.

And again all is still. The wind is flirting with the rigging, the screw is throbbing, the waves are lashing, the bunks creak, but the ear has long since become used to these sounds, and everything around seems to slum- ber in silence. It is dull. The three invalids—two sol- diers and a sailor—who were playing cards all day are dozing and talking deliriously.

The ship is apparently beginning to roll. The bunk slowly rises and falls under Gusev as though it were breathing, and this occurs once, twice, three times . . . Something hits the floor with a clang: a jug must have dropped.

"The wind has broken loose from its chain," says Gusev, straining his ears.

This time Pavel lvanych coughs and says irritably:

"One minute a vessel bumps into a fish, the next the wind breaks loose from its chain . . . Is the wind a beast that it breaks loose from its chain?"

"That's what Christian folks say."

"They are as ignorant as you . . . They say all sorts of things. One must have one's head on one's shoulders and reason it out. You have no sense."

Pavel lvanych is subject to seasickness. When the sea is rough he is usually out of sorts, and the merest trifle irritates him. In Gusev's opinion there is absolutely nothing to be irritated about. What is there that is strange or out of the way about that fish, for instance, or about the wind breaking loose from its chain? Sup- pose the fish were as big as the mountain and its back as hard as a sturgeon's, and supposing, too, that over yon- der at the end of the world stood great stone walls and the fierce winds were chained up to the walls. If they haven't broken loose, why then do they rush all over the sea like madmen and strain like hounds tugging at their leash? If they are not chained up what becomes of them when it is calm?

Gusev ponders for a long time about fishes as big as a mountain and about stout, rusty chains. Then he be- gins to feel bored and falls to thinking about his home, to which he is returning after five years' service in the Far East. He pictures an immense pond covered with drifts. On one side of the pond is the brick-colored building of the pottery with a tall chimney and clouds of black smoke; on the other side is a village. His brother Alexey drives out of the fifth yard from the end in a sleigh; behind him sits his little son Vanka in big felt boots, and his little girl Akulka also wearing felt boots. Alexey has had a drop, Vanka is laughing, Akul- ka's face cannot be seen, she is m^Hed up.

"If he doesn't look out, he will have the children frostbitten," Gusev reflects. "Lord send them sense that they may honor their parents and not be any wiser than their father and mother."

"They need new soles," a delirious sailor says in a bass voice. "Yes, yes!"

Gusev's thoughts abruptly break off and suddenly without rhyme or reason the pond is replaced by a huge bull's head without eyes, and the horse and sleigh are no longer going straight ahead but are whirling round and round, wrapped in black smoke. But still he is glad he has had a glimpse of his people. In fact, he is breath- less with joy, and his whole body, down to his fingertips, tingles with it. "Thanks be to God we have seen each other again," he mutters deliriously, but at once opens his eyes and looks for water in the dark.

He drinks and lies do^, and again the sleigh is glid- mg along, then again there is the bull's head without "lyes, smoke, clouds . . . And so it goes till daybreak.

II

A blue circle is the first thing to become visible in the darkness—it is the porthole; then, little by little, Gusev makes out the man in the next bunk, Pavel Ivanych. The man sleeps sitting up, as he cannot breathe lying down. His face is gray, his nose long and sharp, his eyes look huge because he is terribly emaciated, his temples are sunken, his beard skimpy, his hair long. His face does not reveal his social status: you cannot tell whether he is a gentleman, a merchant, or a peasant. Judging from his expression and his long hair, he may be an as- siduous churchgoer or a lay brother, but his manner of speaking does not seem to be that of a monk. He is utterly worn out by his cough, by the stifling heat, his illness, and he breathes with difficulty, moving his parched lips. Noticing that Gusev is looking at him he turns his face toward him and says:

"I begin to guess • • • Yes, I understand it all per- fectly now,"

"What do you understand, Pavel Ivanych?" "Here's how it is . . . It has always seemed strange to me that terribly ill as you fellows are, you should be on a steamer where the stilling air, the heavy seas, in fact everything, threatens you with death; but now it is all clear to me . . . Yes . . . The doctors put you on the steamer to get rid of you. They got tired of bothering with you, cattle . . . You don't pay them any money, you are a nuisance, and you spoil their sta- tistics with your deaths . . . So, of course, you are just cattle. And it's not hard to get rid of you . . . All that's necessary is, in the first place, to have no con- science or h^anity, and, secondly, to deceive the ship authorities. The first requirement need hardly be given a thought—in that respect we are virtuosos, and as for the second condition, it can always be fulfilled with a little practice. In a crowd of four hundred healthy sol- diers and sailors, five sick ones are not conspicuous; weU, they got you all onto the steamer, mixed you with the healthy ones, hurriedly counted you over, and in the confusion nothing untoward was noticed, and when the steamer was on the way, people discovered that there were paralytics and consumptives on their last legs lying about the deck . . ."

Gusev does not understand Pavel Ivanych; thinking that he is being reprimanded, he says in self-justifica- tion:

"I lay on the deck because I was so sick; when we were being unloaded from the barge onto the steamer, I caught a bad chiU."

"It's revolting,'' Pavel Ivanych continues. "The main thing is, they know perfectly well that you can't stand the long journey and yet they put you here. Suppose you last as far as the Indian Ocean, and then what? It's horrible to think of . . . And that's the gratitude for your faithful, irreproachable service!"

Pavel Ivanych's eyes flash with anger. He frowns fastidiously and says, gasping for breath, "Those are the people who ought to be given a drubbing in the news- papers till the feathers fly in all directions."

The two sick soldiers and the sailor have waked up and are already playing cards. The sailor is half reclin- ing in his bunk, the soldiers are sitting near by on the floor in most uncomfortable positions. One of the sol- diers has his right arm bandaged and his wrist is heavily swathed in wrappings that look like a cap, so that he holds his cards under his right arm or in the crook of his elbow while he plays with his left. The ship is rolling heavily. It is impossible to stand up, or have tea, or take medicine.

"Were you an orderly?" Pavel Ivanych asks Gusev.

"Yes, sir, an orderly."

"My God, my God!" says Pavel Ivanych and shakes his head sadly. "To tear a man from his home, drag him a distance of ten thousand miles, then wear him out till he gets consumption and . . . and what is it all for, one asks? To turn him into an orderly for some Captain Kopeykin or Midshipman Dyrka! How reasonable!"

"It's not hard work, Pavel Ivanych. You get up in the morning and polish the boots, start the samovars going, tidy the rooms, and then you have nothing more to do. The lieutenant drafts plans all day, and if you like, you can say your prayers, or read a book or go out on the street. God grant everyone such a life."

"Yes, very good! The lieutenant drafts plans all day long, and you sit in the kitchen and long for home . . . Plans, indeed! . . . It's not plans that matter but hu- man life. You have only one life to live and it mustn't be wronged."

"Of course, Pavel Ivanych, a bad man gets no break anywhere, either at home or in the service, but if you live as you ought and obey orders, who will want to wrong you? The officers are educated gentlemen, they understand . . . In five years I have never once been in the guard house, and I was struck, if I remember right, only once."

"What for?"

"For fighting. I have a heavy hand, Pavel Ivanych. Four Chinks came into our yard; they were bringing firewood or something, I forget. Well, I was bored and I knocked them about a bit, the nose of one of them, damn him, began bleeding . . . The lieutenant saw it all through the window, got angry, and boxed me on the ear."

"You are a poor, foolish fellow . . ." whispers Pavel lvanych. "You don't understand anything."

He is utterly exhausted by the rolling of the ship and shuts his eyes; now his head drops back, now it sinks forward on his chest. Several times he tries to lie down but nothing comes of it: he finds it difficult to breathe.

"And what did you beat up the four Chinks for?" he asks after a while.

"Oh, just like that. They came into the yard and I hit them."

There is silence . . . The card-players play for two hours, eagerly, swearing sometimes, but the rolling and pitching of the ship overcomes them, too; they throw aside the cards and lie down. Again Gusev has a vision: the big pond, the pottery, the village . . . Once more the sleigh is gliding along, once more Vanka is laughing and Akulka, the silly thing, throws open her fur coat and thrusts out her feet, as much as to say: "Look, good people, my felt boots are not like Vanka's, they're new ones."

"Going on six, and she has no sense yet," Gusev mut- ters in his delirium. "Instead of showing off your boots you had better come and get your soldier uncle a drink. I'U give you a present."

And here is Andron with a flintlock on his shoulder, carrying a hare he has killed, and behind him is the decrepit old Jew Isaychik, who offers him a piece of soap in exchange for the hare; and here is the black calf in the entry, and Domna sewing a shirt and crying about something, and then again the bull's head without eyes, black smoke . . .

Someone shouts overhead, several sailors run by; it seems that something bulky is being dragged over the deck, something falls with a crash. Again some people run by. . . . Has there been an accident? Gusev raises his head, listens, and sees that the two soldiers and the sailor are playing cards again; Pavel Ivanych is sitting up and moving his lips. It is stifling, you haven't the strength to breathe, you are thirsty, the water is warm, disgusting. The ship is still rolling and pitching.

Suddenly something strange happens to one of the soldiers playing cards. He calls hearts diamonds, gets muddled over his score, and drops his cards, then with a frightened, foolish smile looks round at all of them.

"I shan't be a minute, fellows . . ." he says, and lies do^ on the floor.

Everybody is nonplussed. They call to him, he does not answer.

"Stepan, maybe you are feeling bad, eh?" the soldier with the bandaged arm asks him. "Perhaps we had bet- ter call the priest, eh?"

"Have a drink of water, Stepan . . ." says the sailor. "Here, brother, drink."

'Why are you knocking the jug against his teeth?" says Gusev angrily. "Don't you see, you cabbage-head?"

"Wiat?"

"What?" Gusev mimicks him. "There is no breath in him, he's dead! That's what! Such stupid people, Lord God!"

III

The ship has stopped rolling and Pavel lvanych is cheerful. He is no longer cross. His face wears a boast- ful, challenging, mocking expression. It is as though he wants to say: "Yes, right away I'll tell you something that will make you burst with laughter." The round port- hole is open and a soft breeze is blowing on Pavel Ivanych. There is a sound of voices, the splash of oars in the water . . . Just under the porthole someone is droning in a thin, disgusting voice; must be a Chinaman singing.

"Here we are in the harbor," says Pavel lvanych with a mocking smile. "Only another month or so and we shall be in Russia. M'yes, messieurs of the armed forces! 111 arrive in Odessa and from there go straight to Khar- kov. In Kharkov I have a friend, a man of letters. I'll go to him and say, 'Come, brother, put aside your vile sub- jects, women's amours and the beauties of Nature, and show up the two-legged vermin . • • There's a subject for you."

For a while he reflects, then says:

"Gusev, do you know how I tricked them?"

"Tricked who, Pavel Ivanych?"

"Why, these people . . . You understand, on this steamer there is only a first class and a third class, and they only allow peasants, that is, the common herd, to go in the third. If you have got a jacket on and even at a distance look like a gentleman or a bourgeois, you have to go first class, if you please. You must fork out five hundred rubles if it kills you. 'Why do you have such a regulation?' I ask them. 'Do you mean to raise the prestige of the Russian intelligentsia thereby?' 'Not a bit of it. We don't let you simply because a decent person can't go third class; it is too horrible and disgusting there.' 'Yes, sir? Thank you for being so solicitous about decent people's welfare. But in any case, whether it's nasty there or nice, I haven't got five hundred mbles. I didn't loot the Treasury, I didn't exploit the natives, I didn't traffic in contraband, I flogged nobody to death, so judge for yourselves if I have the right to occupy a first class cabin and even to reckon myself among the Russian intelligentsia.' But logic means nothing to them. So I had to resort to fraud. I put on a peasant coat and high boots, I pulled a face so that I looked like a com- mon drunk, and went to the agents: 'Give us a little ticket, your Excellency,' said I—"

"You're not of the gentry, are you?" asked the sailor.

"I come of a clerical family. My father was a priest, and an honest one; he always told the high and mighty the truth to their faces and, as a result, he suffered a great deal."

Pavel Ivanych is exhausted from talking and gasps for breath, but still continues:

"Yes, I always tell people the truth to their faces. I'm not afraid of anyone or anything. In this respect, there is a great difference between me and all of you, men. You are dark people, blind, crushed; you see nothing and what you do see, you don't understand • • • You are told that the wind breaks loose from its chain, that you are beasts, savages, and you believe it; someone gives it to you in the neck—you kiss his hand; some animal in a racoon coat robs you and then tosses you a fifteen-kopeck tip and you say: 'Let me kiss your hand, sir.' You are outcasts, pitiful wretches. I am different, my mind is clear. I see it all plainly like a hawk or an eagle when it hovers over the earth, and I understand everything. I am protest personified. I see tyranny—I protest. I see a hypocrite—I protest, I see a triumphant swine—I protest. And I cannot be put down, no Spanish Inquisition can silence me. No. Cut out my tongue and I will protest with gestures. Wall me up in a cellar—I will shout so that you will hear me half a mile away, or will starve myself to death, so that they may have an- other weight on their black consciences. Kill me and I will haunt them. All my acquaintances say to me: 'You are a most insufferable person, Pavel Ivanych.' I am proud of such a reputation. I served three years in the Far East and I shall be remembered there a hundred years. I had rows there with everybody. My friends wrote to me from Russia: 'Don't come back,' but here I am going back to spite them . . . Yes . . . That's life as I understand it. That's what one can call life."

Gusev is not listening; he is looking at the porthole. A junk, flooded with dazzling hot sunshine, is swaying on the transparent turquoise water. In it stand naked Chinamen, holding up cages with canaries in them and calling out: "It sings, it sings!"

Another boat knocks against it; a steam cutter glides past. Then there is another boat: a fat Chinaman sits in it, eating rice with chopsticks. The water sways lazily, white sea gulls languidly hover over it.

"Would be fi.ne to give that fat fellow one in the neck," reflects Gusev, looking at the stout Chinaman and ya^ing.

He dozes off and it seems to him that aU nature is dozing too. Time flies swiftly by. Imperceptibly the day passes. Imperceptibly darkness descends . . . The steamer is no longer standing still but is on the move again.

IV

Two days pass. Pavel lvanych no longer sits up but is lying down. His eyes are closed, his nose seems to have grown sharper.

"Pavel lvanych," Gusev calls to him. "Hey, Pavel Ivanych."

Pavel Ivanych opens his eyes and moves his lips.

"Are you feeling bad?"

"No . . . It's nothing . . ." answers Pavel Ivanych gasping for breath. "Nothing, on the contrary ... I am better . . . You see, I can lie down now . . .I have improved . . ."

"Well, thank God for that, Pavel Ivanych."

"When I compare myself to you, I am sorry for you, poor fellows. My lungs are healthy, mine is a stomach cough ... I can stand hell, let alone the Red Sea. Be- sides, I take a critical attitude toward my illness and the medicines. While you— Your minds are dark . . . It's hard on you, very, very hard!"

The ship is not rolling, it is quiet, but as hot and stifling as a Turkish bath; it is hard, not only to speak, but even to listen. Gusev hugs his knees, lays his head on them and thinks of his home. God, in this stifling heat, what a relief it is to think of snow and cold! You're driving in a sleigh; all of a sudden, the horses take fright at something and bolt. Careless of the road, the ditches, the gullies, they tear like mad things right through the village, across the pond, past the pottery, across the open fields. "Hold them!" the pottery hands and the peasants they meet shout at the top of their voices. "Hold them!" But why hold them? Let the keen cold wind beat in your face and bite your hands; let the lumps of snow, kicked up by the horses, slide do^ your collar, your neck, your chest; let the runners sing, and the traces and the whippletrees break, the devil take them. And what delight when the sleigh upsets and you go flying full tilt into a drift, face right in the snow, and then you get up, white all over with icicles on your mustache, no cap, no gloves, your belt undone . . . People laugh, dogs bark . . .

Pavel Ivanych half opens one eye, fixes Gusev with it and asks softly: "Gusev, did your commanding officer steal?" "Who can tell, Pavel Ivanych? We can't say, we didn't hear about it."

And after that, a long time passes in silence. Gusev broods, his mind wanders, and he keeps drinking water: it is hard for him to talk and hard for him to listen, and he is afraid of being talked to. An hour passes, a second, a third; evening comes, then night, but he doesn't notice it; he sits up and keeps dreaming of the frost.

There is a sound as though someone were coming into the infirmary, voices are heard, but five minutes pass and all is quiet again.

"The kingdom of Heaven be his and eternal peace," says the soldier with a bandaged arm. "He was an un- easy chap."

"What?" asks Gusev. "Who?"

"He died, they have just carried him up."

"Oh, well," mutters Gusev, yawning, "the kingdom of Heaven be his."

"What do you think, Gusev?" the soldier with the bandaged arm says after a while. "Will he be in the kingdom of Heaven or not?"

"Who do you mean?"

"Pavel Ivanych."

"He will . . . He suffered so long. Then again, he belonged to the clergy and priests have a lot of relatives. Their prayers will get him there."

The soldier with the bandage sits down on Gusev's bunk and says in an undertone:

"You too, Gusev, aren't long for this world. You will never get to Russia."

"Did the doctor or the nurse say so?" asks Gusev.

"It isn't that they said so, but one can see it. It's plain when a man will die soon. You don't eat, you don't drink, you've got so thin it's dreadful to look at you. It's consumption, in a word. I say it not to worry you, but because maybe you would like to receive the sacrament and extreme unction. And if you have any money, you had better turn it over to the senior officer."

"I haven't written home," Gusev sighs. "I shall die and they won't know."

"They will," the sick sailor says in a bass voice. "When you die, they will put it do^ in the ship's log, in Odessa they will send a copy of the entry to the army authorities, and they will notify your district board or somebody like that."

Such a conversation makes Gusev uneasy and a vague craving begins to torment him. He takes a drink —it isn't that; he drags himself to the porthole and breathes the hot, moist air—it isn't that; he tries to think of home, of the frost—it isn't that • . • At last it seems to him that if he stays in the infirmary another minute, he wiU certainly choke to death.

"It's stifling, brother," he says. "I'U go on deck. Take me there, for Christ's sake."

"All right," the soldier with the bandage agrees. "Yoou can't walk, I'll carry you. Hold on to my neck."

Gusev puts his arm around the soldier's neck, the lat- ter places his uninjured arm round him and carries him up. On the deck, discharged soldiers and sailors are lying asleep side by side; there are so many of them it is difficult to pass.

"Get down on the floor," the soldier with the bandage says softly. "Follow me quietly, hold on to my shirt."

It is dark, there are no lights on deck or on the masts or anywhere on the sea around. On the prow the seaman on watch stands perfectly still like a statue, and it looks as though he, too, were asleep. The steamer seems to be left to its own devices and to be going where it pleases.

"Now they'll throw Pavel Ivanych into the sea," says the soldier with the bandage, "in a sack and then into the water."

"Yes, that's the regulation."

"At home, it's better to lie in the earth. Anyway, your mother will come to the grave and shed a tear."

"Sure."

There is a smell of dung and hay. With drooping heads, steers stand at the ship's rail. One, two, three— eight of theml And there's a pony. Gusev puts out his hand to stroke it, but it shakes its head, shows its teeth, and tries to bite his sleeve.

"Damn bmtel" says Gusev crossly.

The two of them thread their way to the prow, then stand at the rail, peering. Overhead there is deep sky, bright stars, peace and quiet, exactly as at home in the village. But below there is darkness and disorder. Tall waves are making an uproar for no reason. Each one of them as you look at it is trying to rise higher than all the rest and to chase and crush its neighbor; it is thun- derously attacked by a third wave that has a gleaming white mane and is just as ferocious and ugly.

The sea has neither sense nor pity. If the steamer had been smaller, not made of thick iron plates, the waves would have crushed it without the slightest remorse, and would have devoured all the people in it without distinguishing between saints and sinners. The steamer's expression was equally senseless and cruel. This beaked monster presses forward, cutting millions of waves in its path; it fears neither darkness nor the wind, nor space, nor solitude—it's all child's play for it, and if the ocean had its population, this monster would crush it, too, without distinguishing between saints and sinners.

"Where are we now?" asks Gusev.

"I don't know. Must be the ocean."

"You can't see land . . ."

"No chance of itl They say we'll see it only in seven days."

The two men stare silently at the white phosphores- cent foam and brood. Gusev is fir!!t to break the silence.

"There is nothing frightening here," he says. "Only you feel queer as if you were in a dark forest; but if, let's say, they lowered the boat this minute and an offi- cer ordered me to go fifty miles across the sea to catch fish, I'll go. Or, let's say, if a Christian were to fall into the water right now, I'd jump in after him. A German or a Chink I wouldn't try to save, but I'd go in after a Christian."

"And are you afraid to die?" -

"I am. I ^ sorry about the farm. My brother at horne, you know, isn't steady; he drinks, he beats his wife for no reason, he doesn't honor his father and mother. With- out me everything will go to rack and ruin, and before long it's my fear that my father and old mother will be begging their bread. But my legs won't hold me up, brother, and it's stifling here. Let's go to sleep."

v

Gusev goes back to the infirmary and gets into his bunk. He is again tormented by a vague desire and he can't make out what it is that he wants. There is a weight on his chest, a throbbing in his head, his mouth is so dry that it is difficult for him to move his tongue. He dozes and talks in his sleep and, worn out with nightmares, with coughing and the stifling heat, towards morning he falls into a heavy sleep. He dreams that they have just taken the bread out of the oven in the barracks and that he has climbed into the oven and is having a steam bath there, lashing himself with a besom of birch twigs. He sleeps for two days and on the third at noon hyo sailors come down and carry him out of the in- firmary. He is sewn up in sailcloth and to make him heavier, they put two gridirons in with him. Sewnwn up in sailcloth, he looks like a carrot or a radish: broad at the head and narrow at the feet. Before sunset, they c^^ him on deck and put him on a plank. One end of the plank lies on the ship's rail, the other on a box placed on a stool. Round him stand the discharged soldiers and the crew with heads bared.

"Blessed is our God," the priest begins, "now, and ever, and unto ages of ages."

"Amen," three sailors chant.

The discharged men and the CFew cross themselves and look off at the waves. It is strange that a man should be sewn up in sailcloth and should soon be flying into the sea. Is it possible that such a thing can happen to anyone?

The priest strews earth upon Gusev and makes obei- sance to him. The men sing "Memory Eternal."

The seaman on watch duty raises the end of the plank, Gusev slides off it slowly and then flying, head foremost, turns over in the air and—plop! Foam covers him, and for a moment, he seems to be wrapped in lace, but the instant passes and he disappears in the waves.

He plunges rapidly downward. Will he reach the bot- tom? At this spot the ocean is said to be three miles deep. After sinking sixty or seventy feet, he begins to descend more and more slowly, swaying rhythmically as though in hesitation, and, carried along by the current, moves faster laterally than vertically.

And now he runs into a school of fish called pilot fish. Seeing the dark body, the little fish stop as though petri- fied and suddenly all turn round together and disappear. In less than a minute they rush back at Gusev, swift as arrows and begin zigzagging round him in the water. Then another dark body appears. It is a shark. With dignity and reluctance, seeming not to notice Gusev, as it were, it swims under him; then while he, moving downward, sinks upon its back, the shark turns, belly upward, basks in the warm transparent water and lan- guidly opens its jaws with two rows of teeth. The pilot fish are in ecstasy; they stop to see what will happen next. After playing a little with the body, the shark non- chalantly puts his jaws under it, cautiously touches it with his teeth and the sailcloth is ripped the full length of the body, from head to foot; one of the gridirons falls out, frightens the pilot fish and striking the shark on the flank, sinks rapidly to the bottom.

Meanwhile, up above, in that part of the sky where the sun is about to set, clouds are massing, one resem- bling a triumphal arch, another a lion, a third a pair of scissors. A broad shaft of green light issues from the clouds and reaches to the middle of the sky; a while later, a violet beam appears alongside of it and then a golden one and a pink one . . . The heavens turn a soft lilac tint. Looking at this magnificent enchanting sky, the ocean frowns at first, but soon it, too, takes on tender, joyous, passionate colors for which it is hard to find a name in the language of man.

1890

Anna on the Neck

the ceremony not even light refreshments

were served; the bride and groom each drank a glass of wine, changed their clothes, and drove to the station. Instead of having a gay ball and supper, instead of music and dancing, they traveled a hundred and fifty miles to perform their devotions at a shrine. Many peo- ple commended this, saying that Modest Alexeich had aheady reached a high rank in the service and was no longer young, and that a noisy wedding might not have seemed quite proper; and besides, music is likely to sound dreary when a fifty-two-year-old official marries a girl who has just turned eighteen. It was also said that Modest Alexeich, being a man of principle, had really arranged this visit to the monastery in order to make it clear to his young bride that in marriage, too, he gave the first place to religion and morality.

The couple were seen off by relatives and the groom's colleagues. The crowd stood, with the glasses in their hands, waiting to shout "hurrah" as soon as the train should start, and the bride's father, Pyotr Leontyich, in a top hat and the dress coat of a schoolmaster, already drunk and very pale, kept craning toward the window, glass in hand, and saying imploringly, "Anyuta! Anya, Anyal Just one word!"

Anya leaned out of the window toward him and he whispered something to her, enveloping her in a smell of alcohol and blowing into her ear—she could understand nothing—and made the sign of the cross over her face, her bosom, and her hands. His breathing came in gasps and tears shone in his eyes. And Anya's brothers, Petya and Andrusha, schoolboys, pulled at his coattails from behind, whispering embarrassedly: "Papa dear, enough . . . Papa dear, don't—"

When the train started, Anya saw her father run a little way after the coach, staggering and spilling his wine, and what a pitiful, kindly, guilty face he had! "Hurrah!" he shouted.

The couple were left alone. Modest Alexeich looked about the compartment, arranged their things on the shelves, and sat down opposite his young wife, smiling. He was an official of medium height, rather stout, who looked bloated and very well fed and wore Dundreary whiskers. His clean-shaven, ronnd, sharply outlined chin looked like a heel. The most characteristic thing about his face was the absence of a mustache, this bare, freshly shaven spot which gradually passed into fat cheeks that quivered like jelly. His demeanor was digni- fied, his movements unhurried, his manners suave.

"At the moment I cannot help recalling one circum- stance," he said smiling. "When, five years ago, Kosoro- tov received the order of St. Anna of the second class, and came to thank His Excellency for the honor, His Excellency expressed himself thus: 'So now you have three Annas: one in your buttonhole and two on your neck.' I must tell you that at that time Kosorotov's wife, a quarrelsome person of a giddy disposition, had just returned to him and that her name was Anna. I trust that when I receive the Anna of the second class, His Excellency wiU have no cause to say the same thing to me.

He smiled with his small eyes. And she, too, smiled, troubled by the thought that at any moment this man might kiss her with his full, moist lips and that she no longer had the right to prevent him from doing so. The soft movements of his bloated body frightened her; she felt both terrified and disgusted. He got up without haste, took the order off his neck, took off his dress coat and waistcoat and put on his dressing-gownwn. "That's better," he said, sitting down beside Anya . .

She remembered what agony the marriage ceremony had been, when it had seemed to her that the priest, the guests, and everyone in the church had looked at her sadly: why was she, such a sweet, nice girl, marrying an elderly uninteresting man? Only that morning she had been in raptures over the fact that everything had been satisfactorily arranged, but during the ceremony and now in the railway carriage, she felt guilty, cheated, and ridiculous. Here she had married a rich man and

anna on the neck 271

yet she had no money. Her wedding dress had been bought on credit, and just now when her father and brothers had been saying good-by, she could see from their faces that they had not a kopeck to their name. Would they have any supper tonight? And tomorrow? And for some reason it seemed to her that her father and the boys without her were suffering from hunger and feeling as miserable as they did the day after their mother's funeral. "Oh, how unhappy I am," she thought. "Why am I so unhappy?"

With the awkwardness of a man of dignified habits who is unaccustomed to dealing with women, Modest Alexeich touched her on the waist and patted her on the shoulder while she thought of money, of her mother, and her mother's death. When her mother died, her father, a high school teacher of calligraphy and drawing, had taken to drink and they had begun to feel the pinch of poverty; the boys had no shoes or galoshes. Time and again her father was hauled before the justice of the peace, the process-server came and made an inventory of the furniture . . . What a disgrace! Anya had to look after her drunken father, darn her brothers' socks, do the marketing, and when she was complimented on her beauty, her youth, and her elegant manner, it seemed to her that the whole world was looking at her cheap hat and the holes in her shoes that were inked over. And at night there were tears and the disturbing persistent thought that soon, very soon, her father would be dis- missed from the school for his failing and that he would not be able to endure it and would die like their mother. But then some ladies they knew had bestirred them- selves and started looking about for a good match for Anya. This Modest Alexeich, who was neither young nor good-looking but had money, was soon found. He had 100,000 in the bank and a family estate which he rented to a tenant. He was a man of principle and was in favor with His Excellency; it would be very easy for him, Anya was told, to get a note from His Excellency to the high school principal or even to the trustee, and Pyotr Leontyich would not be dismissed . . .

While she was recalling these details, strains of music together with a sound of voices suddenly burst in at the window. The train had stopped at a small station. On the other side of the platform in the crowd an accordion and a cheap squeaky fiddle were being played briskly, and from beyond the tall birches and poplars and the small cottages that were flooded with moonlight came the sound of a military band: there must have been a dance in the place. Summer visitors and to^speople who came here by train in fine weather for a breath of fresh air were promenading on the platform. Among them was the owner of all the summer cottages, Arty- nov, a man of wealth. Tall, stout, black-haired, with prominent eyes, he looked like an Armenian. He wore a strange costume: an unbuttoned shirt that left his chest bare, high boots with spurs, and a black cloak which hung from his shoulders and trailed on the ground. Two borzois followed him with their sharp muzzles to the ground.

Tears were still glistening in Anya's eyes, but she was now no longer thinking of her mother or money or her mariage. She was shaking hands with high school boys and officers of her acquaintance, laughing gaily and saying quickly, "How do you do? How are you?"

She went out into the moonlight and stood so that they could aU see her in her new splendid costume and hat.

'Why are we stopping here?" she asked.

"This is a siding. They are waiting for the mail train > »

to pass.

Noticing that Artynov was looking at her, she screwed up her face coquettishly and began talking aloud in French; and because her voice sounded so well and because music was heard and the moon was re- flected in the pond, and because Artynov, the notorious Don Juan and rake, was looking at her greedily and in- quisitively, and because everyone was gay, she suddenly felt happy, and when the train started, and her friends the officers saluted her, she was humming a polka, the strains of which reached her from the military band which was blaring somewhere beyond the trees; and she returned to her compartment feeling as if she had been persuaded at the station that she would certainly be happy in spite of everything.

The couple spent two days at the monastery, then re- turned to town. They lived in an apartment supplied by the government. When Modest Alexeich left for the office, Anya would play the piano or cry out of sheer boredom or lie down on a couch and read novels or look through fashion journals. At dinner Modest Alexeich ate a great deal, talked about politics, new appointments, transfers and bonuses, and declared that one should work hard, that family life was not a pleasure but a duty, that if you took care of the kopecks, the rubles would take care of themselves, and that he put religion and morality above everything else in the world. And holding the knife in his fist like a sword, he would say:

"Everyone must have his duties!"

And Anya listened to him, was frightened, and could not eat, so that she usually rose from the table hungry. After dinner her husband took a nap and snored loudly while she went to see her own people. Her father and the boys looked at her in a peculiar way, as if just before she came they had been blaming her for having married for money a tedious, tiresome man whom she did not love. Her rustling skirts, her bracelets, and her general ladylike air made them uncomfortable, offended them. In her presence they felt a little embarrassed and did not know what to talk to her about; but they still loved her as before and were not used to having dinner with- out her. She sat down with them to cabbage soup, thick porridge, and potatoes fried in mutton fat that smelled of tallow candles. With a trembling hand Pyotr Leon- tyich filled his glass from a decanter and drank it off quickly, greedily, with disgust, then drank a second glass, then a third. Petya and Andrusha, thin, pale boys with big eyes, would take the decanter and say with embarrassment:

"You mustn't, Papa dear . . . Enough, Papa dear."

Anya, too, was troubled and would beg him to drink no more; and he would suddenly fly into a rage and strike the table with his fist. "I will not be dictated to!" he would shout. ''Wretched boys! Wretched girl! I will rum you all out!"

But there was a note of weakness, of kindness in his voice, and no one was afraid of him. Mter dinner he usu- aUy spruced himself up. Pale, with cuts on his chin from shaving, he would stand for half an hour before the mirror, craning his thin neck, preening himself, combing his hair, twisting his black mustache, sprin- kling himself with scent, tying his cravat in a bow; then he would put on his gloves and his top hat and would go off to give private lessons. If there was a holiday, he would stay at home and paint or play the harmonium, which hissed and growled; he would try to wrest me- lodious tones from it and would storm at the boys: "Scamps! Wretches! They have spoiled the instrument!"

Evenings Anya's husband played cards with his col- leagues who lived under the same roof in the govern- ment quarters. During these parties the wives of the functionaries would also assemble—homely, tastelessly dressed women, as coarse as cooks, and gossip, as ugly and insipid as the women themselves, would start in the apartment. Sometimes Modest Alexeich would take Anya to the theater. During the intermissions he would not let her go a step from his side but walked about arm in ann with her through the corridors and the foyer. When he bowed to anyone, he immediately whispered to Anya: "A councilor of state . . . received by His Ex- cellency," or "A man of means . . . has a house of his own." When they passed the buffet Anya had a great longing for sweets; she was fond of chocolate and apple tarts, but she had no money and she did not like to ask her husband. He would take a pear, feel it with his fingers, and ask uncertainly, "How much?"

"Twenty-five kopecks."

"I say!" he would exclaim and put the pear back, but as it was awkward to leave the buffet without buying anything, he would order a bottle of soda water and drink it all himself, and tears would come into his eyes. At such times Anya hated him.

Or suddenly turning quite red, he would say to her hurriedly: "Bow to that old lady!"

"But I am not acquainted with her—"

"No matter. That is the wife of the director of the local treasury office! Bow to her, I mean you," he said grumbling insistently. "Your head won't fall off."

Anya bowed and her head really didn't fall off, but it was very painful. She did everything her husband told her to do, and was very angry with herself that she had let herself be deceived like the silliest little fool. She had married him only for his money, and yet she had less money now than before her marriage. Formerly her father would sometimes give her a twenty-kopeck piece, but now she never had a groat. To take money on the quiet or to ask for it, she couldn't; she was afraid of her husband. She trembled before him. It seemed to her as though she had been afraid of him for a long time. In her childhood the high school principal had always seemed to her the most imposing and terrible power in the world, moving along like a thundercloud or a steam locomotive ready to crush everything in its way. Another such power of which they often talked at home, and which for some reason they feared, was His Excellency. Then, there were a dozen other, less formidable powers, and among them were the high school teachers, strict and impeccable, with shaven upper lip. And now finally, it was Modest Alexeich, a man of principle, who re- sembled the head of the school in every particular, in- cluding his face. And in Anya's imagination, all these powers combined into one, and, in the shape of a terrible, huge white bear, bore down upon the weak and guilty, such as her father. And she was afraid to contradict her husband, and with a forced smile and a show of pleas- ure, submitted to his coarse caresses and defiling em- braces which terrified her.

Only once did Pyotr Leontyich make bold to ask his son-in-law for a loan of fifty rubles in order to pay a very unpleasant debt, but what agony it was!

"Very well, I'll give you the money," said Modest Alexeich after a moment's thought, "but I warn you, I won't help you again until you stop drinking. Such a weakness is disgraceful in a man holding a government postl I cannot refrain from calling your attention to the well-known fact that many able people have been ruined by that passion, though temperance might perhaps have permitted them to attain a very high rank."

Followed long-winded sentences with such phrases as, "in proportion to," "whereas," "in view of the afore- said," while poor Pyotr Leontyich was in an agony of humiliation and felt an intense craving for alcohol.

And when the boys came to visit Anya, generally in worn shoes and tlueadbare trousers, they too had to listen to lectures.

"Everyone must have his duties!" Modest Alexeich would say to them. But he would not give them money. To Anya, he would give rings, bracelets, brooches, say- ing that these things would come in handy on a rainy day. And he often unlocked her chest of drawers to see if they were all safe.

Meanwhile the cold season arrived. Before Cluistrnas it was announced in the local newspaper that the usual winter ball would take place on December 29 in the Hall of the Nobility. Every evening after the card-play- ing, Modest Alexeich was excitedly conferring in whis- pers with his colleagues' wives and glancing anxiously at Anya, and afterwards he paced the room from corner to comer for a long time, thinking. At last, late one eve- ning he stood still before Anya and said, "You must have a ball dress made for yourself. Do you understand? Only, please consult Marya Grigoryevna and Natalya Kuzminishna."

And he gave her one hundred rubles. She took the money but didn't consult anyone when she ordered the gownwn. She spoke to no one but her father and tried to imagine how her mother would have dressed for the ball. Her mother had always dressed in the latest fashion and had always taken great pains with Anya, fitting her out elegantly like a doll, and had taught her to speak French and dance the mazurka magnificently (she had been a governess for five years prior to her marriage).

Like her mother, Anya could make a new dress out of an old one, clean gloves with benzine, hire jewelry and, like her mother, she knew how to screw up her eyes, speak with a burr, strike pretty poses, fly into ecstasies when necessary and assume a sad and enigmatic air. And from her father she inherited dark hair and eyes, sensitive nerves, and the habit of always trying to look her best.

When, half an hour before they had to start for the ball, Modest Alexeich went into her room coatless to put his order round his neck in front of her mirror, he was so struck by her beauty and the splendor of her crisp gauzy attire, that he combed his side-whiskers com- placently and said, "So that's how my wife can look . . . So that's how you can look!" And he went on, sud- denly assuming a tone of solemnity, "Anyuta, I have made you happy, and tonight you can make me happy. I beg you to get yourself introduced to His ExceUency's spouse. Do it for me, for God's sake! Through her I may get the post of senior reporting secretary."

They drove to the ball. There it was, the Hall of the Nobility, the lobby and the stately doorman. The vesti- bule was full of hangers, fur coats, footmen scurrying about and decollete ladies putting up their fans to pro- tect themselves from the draft; the place smelled of illuminating gas and soldiers.

When Anya, walking up the stairs on her husband's arm, heard the music and saw herself full-length in the huge pier glass glowing with numberless lights, her heart leapt with joy and with that presentiment of hap- piness which she had experienced in the moonlight at the station. She walked in proudly, confidently, for the first time feeling herself not a little girl but a lady, and unwittingly imitating her late mother's gait and man- ners. And for the first time in her life, she felt rich and free. Even her husband's presence did not embarrass her, for as she crossed the threshold of the hall she had guessed instinctively that the proximity of her elderly husband did not humiliate her in the least, but on the contrary, gave her that touch of piquant mystery that is so attractive to men.

In the ballroom the orchestra was already thundering, and dancing had already begun. After their apartment, Anya, overwhelmed by the lights, the bright colors, the music, the din, looked round the hall and thought: "Oh, how lovely!" and instantly spotted in the crowd all her acquaintances, everyone she had met before at parties or at picnics, all these officers, teachers, lawyers, officials, landowners. His Excellency, too, was there, and Arty- nov, and society ladies in low-neck dresses, the pretty ones and the ugly. These were already taking up posi- tions in the booths and pavilions of the charity bazaar, ready to begin selling things for the benefit of the poor. A huge officer with shoulder-straps—she had been in- troduced to him when she was a schoolgirl and now could not remember his name—loomed up before her, as though he had sprung out of the ground and asked her for a waltz, and she flew away from her husband. She felt as though she were sailing in a boat during a violent storm, while her husband remained far away on the shore . . . She danced passionately, eagerly— waltzes, polkas, quadrilles—passing from one pair of arms to another, dizzy with the music and the hubbub, mixing Russian and French, speaking with a burr, laugh- ing, and not giving a thought to her husband or any- body or anything. She scored a success with the men— that was clear and it couldn't have been otherwise. She was breathless with excitement, she squeezed her fan in her hand convulsively and felt thirsty. Her father in a crumpled coat that smelled of benzine came up to her offering her a saucer of pink ice cream.

"You are ravishing tonight," he said, looking at her enraptured, "and I have never so regretted that you were in such a hurry to get married . . . Why? I know you did it for our sake, but . . ." With a shaking hand, he drew out a roll of notes and said: "I got the money for lessons today, and can pay my debt to your hus- band."

She thrust the saucer back into his hand and, snatched by someone, was carried off far away. Over her partner's shoulder she caught a glimpse of her father gliding across the parquet putting his arm round a lady and whirling her down the hall.

"How charming he is when he is sober," she thought.

She danced the mazurka with the same huge officer. He moved gravely and heavily, like a lifeless carcass in uniform, twitching his shoulders and his chest, stamping his feet almost imperceptibly—he was loath to dance— while she fluttered round him, teasing him with her beauty, her bare neck. Her eyes glowed provokingly, her movements were passionate, while he grew more and more indifferent, and held out his hands to her graciously like a king.

"Bravo! Bravo!" people were exclaiming in the crowd.

But little by little the huge officer, too, lost his com- posure; he came to life, grew excited, and yielding to her fascination, was carried away and danced lightly, youthfully, while she merely moved her shoulders and looked slyly at him as though she were now the queen and he were her slave. At that moment it seemed to her that the whole ballroom was looking at them, and that everyone was thrilled and envious of them.

The huge officer had hardly had time to thank her for the dance when the crowd suddenly parted and the men drew themselves up queerly and let their arms drop. It was His Excellency, with two stars on his dress coat, walking toward her. Yes, His Excellency was really walk- ing toward her, for he was looking directly at her with a sugary smile and was chewing his lips as he always did when he saw pretty women.

"Delighted, delighted," he began, "I shall have your husband put under arrest for keeping such a treasure hidden from us till now. I have come to you with a com- mission from my wife," he went on, offering her his arm. "You must help us. M-m-yes . . . We ought to award you a prize for beauty as they do in America. • • • M-m-yes . • . The Americans . . . My wife is waiting for you impatiently." He led her to a booth and pre- sented her to an elderly lady, the lower part of whose face was disproportionately large, so that she looked as though she had a big stone in her mouth.

"You must help us," she said through her nose in a singsong voice. "All the pretty women are working for our charity bazaar, and for some reason, you alone are doing nothing. Why won't you help us?"

She went away and Anya took her place beside the silver samovar and the cups. She was soon doing a rush- ing business. Anya charged no less than a ruble for a cup of tea, and foiced the huge officer to empty three cups. Artynov, the rich man with the bulging eyes, who suffered from asthma, came up too; he no longer wore the strange costume in which Anya had seen him in the summer at the station, but was in evening clothes like everyone else. Without taking his eyes off Anya, he drank a glass of champagne and paid one hundred rubles for it, then had a cup of tea and gave another hundred, all this without saying a word and wheezing with asthma. Anya solicited customers and got money out of them, firmly convinced by now that her smiles and glances could afford these people nothing but great pleasure. It had dawned upon her that she was made exclusively for this noisy, brilliant life, with laughter, music, dances, admirers, and her old dread of a power that was bearing down upon her and threatened to crush her now seemed ridiculous to her. She was afraid of no one and only regretted that her mother was not there to rejoice with her at her success. Her father, pale by this time, but still steady on his legs, came up to the booth and asked for a glass of cognac. Anya turned crimson, expecting him to say something inappropriate (she was already ashamed of having such a poor, ordi- nary father), but he emptied his glass, took a ten-ruble note from his roll, threw it do^wn, and walked away with silent dignity. A little later she saw him dancing in the grand rond and by now he was staggering and kept caU- ing out something, to his partner's great embarrassment. And Anya remembered how, at a ball three years be- fore, he had staggered and called out in the same way, and it had ended by a police officer taking him home to bed, and the next day, the principal had threatened to dismiss him from his post. What an inappropriate recol- lection it was!

When the samovars in the booths were no longer alight and the weary charity workers had handed over their takings to the middle-aged lady with the stone in her mouth, Artynov led Anya on his arm to the hall where supper was being served for all who had helped at the bazaar. There were some twenty people at sup- per, not more, but it was very noisy. His Excellency proposed this toast: "This luxurious dining room is the appropriate place in which to drink to the success of the soup kitchens for which the bazaar was held."

The Brigadier General proposed a toast "to the power to which even the artillery must bow," and all the men proceeded to clink glasses with the ladies. It was very, very jolly!

When Anya was escorted home, it was daylight and the cooks were going to market. Elated, intoxicated, full of new sensations, exhausted, she undressed, sank into bed and instantly fell asleep.

It was past one in the afternoon when the maid waked her and announced Mr. Artynov who had come to call on her. She dressed quickly and went into the drawing-room. Soon after Artynov left, His Excellency called to thank her for her part in the bazaar. Eyeing her with a sugary smile and chewing his lips, he kissed her hand, asked her permission to come again and took his leave, while she remained standing in the middle of the drawing room, amazed, entranced, unable to believe that a change in her life, a marvelous change, had oc- curred so quickly. And just then her husband walked in. He stood before her now with that ingratiating, sugary, cringingly respectful expression that she was accustomed to see on his face in the presence of the illustrious and the powerful, and with rapture, with indignation, with contempt, confident now that she could do it with im- punity, she said, articulating each word distinctly:

"Get out, you blockhead!"

Mter that, Anya never had a single free day, as she was constantly taking part in picnics, excursions, private theatricals. Each day she returned home in the early hours of the morning and lay down on the floor in the drawing-room, and afterwards told everyone touchingly that she slept under flowers. She needed a great deal of money, but she was no longer afraid of Modest Alexeich, and spent his money as though it were her and she did not ask or demand it, but simply sent him the bills or brief notes like these: "Give the bearer 200 rubles," or "Pay 100 rubles at once."

At Easter Modest Alexeich received the order of St. Anna of the second class. When he went to ofier his thanks, His Excellency put aside the newspaper he was reading and sank deeper into his armchair: "So now you have three Annas," he said, examining his white hands with their pink nails, "one in your buttonhole and two on your neck."

Modest AleJo.eich put two fingers to his lips as a pre- caution against laughing out loud and said: "Now I have only to look forward to the arrival of a little Vladi- mir. May I make bold to beg Your Excellency to stand godfather?"

He was alluding to the Vladimir of the fourth class and was already imagining how he would repeat every- where this joke of his, so felicitous in its aptness and audacity, and he was making ready to say something equally good, but His Excellency was again absorbed in his newspaper and merely nodded to him.

And Anya went on driving about in troikas, hunting with Artynov, playing in one-acters, going out to supper parties, and she saw less and less of her own people. They dined alone now. Her father was drinking more heavily than ever; there was no money, and the har- monium had long since been sold for debt. The boys did not let him go out alone in the street now, but fol- lowed him for fear he might fall; and whenever they met Anya driving down Old Kiev Street in a smart carriage drawnwn by a team of two horses abreast and an out- runner, with Artynov on the box instead of a coachman, Pyotr Leontyich would take ofl his top hat, and would be about to shout something at her, but Petya and An- drusha would take him by the arms and say imploringly: "Don't, Papa dear . • . enough, Papa dear . . ."

1895

In the Cart

_T

HEY drove out of the town at half past eight in the morning.

The paved road was dry, a splendid April sun was shedding warmth, but there was still snow in the ditches and in the woods. Winter, evil, dark, long, had ended so recently; spring had arrived suddenly; but neither the warmth nor the languid, transparent woods, warmed by the breath of spring, nor the black flocks flying in the fields over huge puddles that were like lakes, nor this marvelous, immeasurably deep sky, into which it seemed that one would plunge with such joy, offered anything new and interesting to Marya Vasilyevna, who was sit- ting in the cart. She had been teaching school for thir- teen years, and in the course of all those years she had gone to the town for her salary countless times; and whether it was spring, as now, or a rainy autumn eve- ning, or winter, it was all the same to her, and what she always, invariably, longed for was to reach her destina- tion as soon as possible.

She felt as though she had been living in these parts for a long, long time, for a hundred years, and it seemed to her that she knew every stone, every tree on the road from the town to her school. Here was her past and her present, and she could imagine no other future than

the school, the road to the town and back, and again

the school and again the road.

She had lost the habit of thinking of the time before she became a schoolmistress and had almost forgotten all about it. She had once had a father and mother; they had lived in Moscow in a big apartment near the Red Gate, but all that remained in her memory of that part of her life was something vague and formless like a dream. Her father had died when she was ten years old, and her mother had died soon after. She had a brother, an officer; at first they used to write to each other, then her brother had stopped answering her let- ters, he had lost the habit. Of her former belongings, all that remained was a photograph of her mother, but the dampness in the school had faded it, and now nothing could be seen on it but the hair and the eyebrows.

When they had gone a couple of miles, old Semyon, who was driving, turned round and said:

"They have nabbed an official in the town. They have sent him away. They say that he and some Germans killed Alexeyev, the mayor, in Moscow."

"Who told you that?"

"They read it in the papers, in Ivan Ionov's tea- house."

And again there was a long silence. Marya Vasilyevna thought of her school, of the examinations that were coming soon, and of the girl and the four boys whom she was sending up for them. And just as she was think- ing about the examinations she was overtaken by a landowner named Hanov in a carriage with four horses, the very man who had acted as examiner in her school the previous year. As he drew alongside he recognized her and bowed.

"Good morning," he said. "Are you driving home, madam?"

This Hanov, a man of about forty, with a worn face and a lifeless expression, was beginning to age notice- ably, but was still handsome and attractive to women. He lived alone on his large estate, was not in the serv- ice, and it was said of him that he did nothing at home but pace from one end of the room to the other, whis- tling, or play chess with his old footman. It was said, too, that he drank heavily. And indeed, at the examina- tion the previous year the very papers he had brought with him smelt of scent and wine. On that occasion everything he wore was brand-new, and Marya Va- silyevna had found him very attractive and, sitting next to him, had felt embarrassed. She was used to see- ing cold, hardheaded examiners at the school, but this one did not remember a single prayer, did not know what questions to ask, was exceedingly polite and con- siderate, and gave only the highest marks.

"I am on my way to visit Bakvist," he continued, addressing Marya Vasilyevna, "but I wonder if he is at home."

They turned off the highway onto a dirt road, Hanov leading the way and Semyon following. The team of four horses kept to the road, slowly pulling the heavy carriage through the mud. Semyon changed his course continually, leaving the road now to drive over a hillock, now to skirt a meadow, often jumping down from the cart and helping the horse. Marya Vasilyevna kept think- ing about the school, and wondering whether the arith- metic problem at the examination would be hard or easy. And she was annoyed with the Zemstvo office, where she had found no one the previous day. What negligence! For the past two years she had been asking them to discharge the janitor, who did nothing, was rude to her, and cuffed the boys, but no one paid any attention to her. It was hard to find the chairman at the office and when you did find him, he would say with tears in his eyes that he had no time; the inspector visited the school once in three years and had no under- standing of anything connected with it, since he had formerly been employed in the Finance Department and had obtained the post of school inspector through pull; the School Board met very rarely and no one knew where; the Trustee was a half literate peasant, the ownwner of a tannery, stupid, coarse, and a bosom friend of the janitor's—and heaven knows to whom she could with complaints and inquiries.

"He is really handsome," she thought, glancing at Hanov.

Meanwhile the road was growing worse and worse. They drove into the woods. Here there was no turning off the road, the ruts were deep, and water flowed and gurgled in them. Twigs struck them stingingly in the face.

"How's the road?" asked Hanov, and laughed.

The schoolmistress looked at him and could not un- derstand why this odd fellow lived here. What could his money, his interesting appearance, his refinement get him in this Godforsaken place, with its mud, its boredom? Life granted him no privileges, and here, like Semyon, he was jogging slowly along over an abomina- ble road and suffering the same discomforts. Why live here, when one had a chance to live in Petersburg or abroad? And it seemed as though it would be a simple matter for a rich man like him to turn this bad road into a good one so as to avoid having to endure this misery and seeing the despair written on the faces of his coach- man and Semyon? But he merely laughed, and appar- ently it was all the same to him, and he asked nothing better of life. He was kind, gentle, naive; he had no grasp of this coarse life, he did not know it, any more than he had known the prayers at the examination. He presented nothing to the schools but globes, and sin- cerely regarded himself as a useful person and a promi- nent worker in the field of popular education. And who had need of his globes here?

"Hold on, Vasilyevna!" said Semyon.

The cart lurched violently and was about to tum over; something heavy fell on Marya Vasilyevna's feet —it was her purchases. There was a steep climb uphill over a clayey road; noisy rivulets were flowing in wind- ing ditches; the water had gullied the road; and how could one drive here! The horses breathed heavily. Hanov got out of the carriage and walked at the edge of the road in his long coat. He was hot.

"How's the road?" he repeated, and laughed. "This is the way to smash your carriage."

"But who tells you to go driving in such weather?" asked Semyon in a surly voice. "You ought to stay home."

"I'm bored at home, grandfather. I don't like staying home."

Next to old Semyon he seemed well-built and vigor- ous, but there was something barely perceptible in his gait which betrayed him as a weak creature, already blighted, approaching its end. And suddenly it seemed as though there were a whiff of liquor in the woods. Marya Vasilyevna felt frightened and was filled with pity for this man who was going to pieces without rhyme or reason, and it occurred to her that if she were his wife or his sister she would devote her whole life to his rescue. His wife! Life was so ordered that here he was living in his great house alone, while she was living in a Godforsaken village alone, and yet for some reason the mere thought that he and she might meet on an equal footing and become intimate seemed impossible, absurd. Fundamentally, life was so arranged and hu- man relations were complicated so utterly beyond all understanding that when you thought about it you were terrified and your heart sank.

"And you can't understand," she thought, "why God gives good looks, friendliness, charming, melancholy eyes to weak, unhappy, useless peopl^—•why they are so attractive."

"Here we must turn off to the right," said Hanov, getting into his carriage. "Good-by! All good wishesl"

And again she thought of her pupils, of the examina- tion, of the janitor, of the School Board; and when the wind brought her the sound of the receding carriage these thoughts mingled with others. She wanted to think of beautiful eyes, of love, of the happiness that would never be. . . .

His wife? It is cold in the morning, there is no one to light the stove, the janitor has gone off somewhere; the children come in as soon as it is light, bringing in snow and mud and making a noise; it is all so uncomfortable, so unpleasant. Her quarters consist of one little room and a kitchen close by. Every day when school is over she has a headache and after dinner she has heartburn. She has to collect money from the children for firewood and to pay the janitor, and to tum it over to the Trustee, and then to implore him—that overfed, insolent peasant —for God's sake to send her firewood. And at night she dreams of examinations, peasants, snowdrifts. And this life has aged and coarsened her, making her homely, angular, and clumsy, as though they had poured lead into her. She is afraid of everything, and in the presence of a member of the Zemstvo Board or of the Trustee, she gets up and does not dare sit down again. And she uses obsequious expressions when she mentions any one of them. And no one likes her, and life is passing drearily, without warmth, without friernlly sympathy, without interesting acquaintances. In her position how terrible it would be if she were to fall in love!

"Hold on, Vasilyevnal"

Another steep climb.

She had begun to teach school from necessity, with- out feeling called to it; and she had never thought of a call, of the need for enlightenment; and it always seemed to her that what was most jmportant in her work was not the children, not enlightenment, but the examinations. And when did she have time to think of a call, of enlightenment? Teachers, impecunious physi- cians, doctors' assistants, for all their terribly hard work, do not even have the comfort of thinking that they are serving an ideal or the people, because their heads are always filled with thoughts of their daily bread, of fire- wood, of bad roads, of sickness. It is a hard, humdrum existence, and only stolid cart horses like Marya Va- silyevna can bear it a long time; lively, alert, impres- sionable people who talk about their calling and about serving the ideal are soon weary of it and give up the work.

Semyon kept on picking out the driest and shortest way, traveling now across a meadow, now behind the cottages, but in one place the peasants would not let them pass and in another the land belonged to the priest and so they could not cross it, in yet another Ivan Ionov had bought a plot from the landowner and had dug a ditch round it. They kept turning back.

They reached Nizhneye Gorodishche. Near the tea- house, on the dung-strewn, snowy ground, there stood wagons loaded with great bottles of oil of vitriol. There were a great many people in the teahouse, all drivers, and it smelled of vodka, tobacco, and sheepskins. The place was noisy with loud talk and the banging of the door which was provided with a pulley. In the shop next door someone was playing an accordion steadily. Marya Vasilyevna was sitting down, having tea, while at the next table some peasants were drinking vodka and beer, sweaty with the tea they had had and the bad air.

"Hey, Kuzma!" people kept shouting confusedly. 'What's doing?" "The Lord bless us!" "Ivan Dementy- ich, that I can do for you!" "See here, friend!"

A little pockmarked peasant with a black beard, who was quite drunk, was suddenly taken aback by some- thing and began using foul language.

'What are you cursing about, you there?" Semyon, who was sitting some way off, remarked angrily. "Don't you see the young lady?"

"The young lady!" someone jeered in another corner.

"The swine!"

"I didn't mean nothing—" The little peasant was embarrassed. "Excuse me. I pays my money and the young lady pays hers. How-de-do, ma'am?"

"How do you do?" answered the schoolmistress.

"And I thank you kindly."

Marya Vasilyevna drank her tea with pleasure, and she, too, began turning red like the peasants, and again she fell to thinking about firewood, about the janitor. . . .

"Wait, brother," came from the next table. "It's the school-ma'am from Vyazovye. I know; she's a good sort."

"She's all right!"

The door was banging continually, some coming in, others going out. Marya Vasilyevna went on sitting there, thinking of the same things all the time, while the accordion went on playing and playing behind the wall. There had been patches of sunlight on the floor, they shifted to the counter, then to the wall, and finally disappeared altogether; this meant that it was past mid- day. The peasants at the next table were getting ready to leave. The little peasant went up to Marya Vasilyevna somewhat unsteadily and shook hands with her; follow- ing his example, the others shook hands with her at parting, and filed out singly, and the door squeaked and slammed nine times.

"Vasilyevna, get ready," Semyon called to her.

They drove off. And again they went at a walking pace.

"A little while back they were building a school here at this Nizhneye Gorodishche," said Semyon, turning round. "There were wicked doings then!"

"Why, what?"

"They say the chairman pocketed a cool thousand, and the Trustee another thousand, and the teacher five hundred."

"The whole school only cost a thousand. It's wrong to slander people, grandfather. That's all nonsense."

"I don't know. I only repeat what folks say."

But it was clear that Semyon did not believe the schoolmistress. The peasants did not believe her. They always thought she received too large a salary, twenty- one rubles a month (five would have been enough), and that she kept for herself the greater part of the money that she received for firewood and for the jani- tor's wages. The Trustee thought as the peasants did, and he himself made something on the firewood and re- ceived a salary from the peasants for acting as Trustee —without the knowledge of the authorities.

The woods, thank God, were behind them, and now it would be clear, level ground all the way to Vyazovye, and they had not far to go now. All they had to do was to cross the river and then the railway line, and then they would be at Vyazovye.

"Where are you going?" Marya Vasilyevna asked Semyon. "Take the road to the right across the bridge."

"Why, we can go this way just as well, it's not so deep."

"Mind you don't drown the horse."

"What?"

"Look, Hanov is driving to the bridge, too," said Marya Vasilyevna, seeing the four-horse team far away to the right. "I think it's he."

"It's him all right. So he didn't find Bakvist in. What a blockhead he is. Lord have mercy on us! He's driving over there, and what for? It's all of two miles nearer this way."

They reached the river. In summer it was a shallow stream, easily forded and usually dried up by August, but now, after the spring floods, it was a river forty feet wide, rapid, muddy, and cold; on the bank, and right up to the water, there were fresh wheel tracks, so it had been crossed there.

"Giddap!" shouted Semyon angrily and anxiously, tugging violently at the reins and flapping his elbows as a bird does its wings. "Giddap!"

The horse went into the water up to its belly and stopped, but at once went on again, straining its mus- cles, and Marya Vasilyevna felt a sharp chill in her feet.

"Giddapl" she shouted, too, standing up. "Giddap!"

They got to the bank.

"Nice mess, Lord have mercy on us!" muttered Sem- yon, setting the harness straight. "It's an affliction, this Zemstvo."

Her shoes and rubbers were full of water, the lower edge of her dress and of her coat and one sleeve were wet and dripping; the sugar and flour had got wet, and that was the worst of it, and Marya Vasilyevna only struck her hands together in despair and said:

"Oh, Semyon, Semyonl What a fellow you are, really!"

The barrier was down at the railway crossing. An express was coming from the station. Marya Vasilyevna stood at the crossing waiting for the train to pass, and shivering all over with cold. Vyazovye was in sight now, and the school with the green roof, and the church with its blazing crosses that reflected the setting sun; and the station windows were aflame, too, and a pink smoke rose from the engine. . . . And it seemed to her that everything was shivering with cold.

Here was the train; the windows, like the crosses on the church, reflected the blazing light; it hurt her eyes to look at them. On the platform of one of the first-class carriages a lady was standing, and Marya Vasilyevna glanced at her as she flashed by. Her mother! What a resemblance! Her mother had had just such luxuriant hair, just such a forehead and that way of holding her head. And with amazing distinctness, for the first time in those thirteen years, she imagined vividly her mother, her father, her brother, their apartment in Moscow, the aquarium with the little fishes, everything down to the smallest detail; she suddenly heard the piano playing, her father's voice; she felt as then, young, good-looking, well-dressed, in a bright warm room among her own people. A feeling of joy and happiness suddenly over- whelmed her, she pressed her hands to her temples in ecstasy, and called softly, imploringly:

"Mama!"

And she began to cry, she did not know why. Just at that moment Hanov drove up with his team of four horses, and seeing him she imagined such happiness as had never been, and smiled and nodded to him as an equal and an intimate, and it seemed to her that the sky, the windows, the trees, were glowing with her hap- piness, her triumph. No, her father and mother had never died, she had never been a schoolmistress, that had been a long, strange, oppressive dream, and now she had awakened. . . .

"Vasilyevna, get in!"

And suddenly it all vanished. The barrier was slowly rising. Marya Vasilyevna, shivering and numb with cold, got into the cart. The carriage with the four horses crossed the railway track, Semyon followed. The guard at the crossing took off his cap.

"And this is Vyazovye. Here we are."

1897

At Home

_T

H E Donetz Railroad. A cheerless station, quiet and lonely, gleaming white on the steppe, with walls hot from the sun, with not a speck of shade and, it ap- pears, with not a single human being. The train which brought you here has left; the sound of it is scarcely audible and at last dies away. The neighborhood of the station is deserted, and there are no carriages but your own. You get into it—this is so pleasant after the train —and you roll along the road through the steppe, and by degrees, a landscape unfolds such as one does not see near Moscow—immense, endless, fascinating in its monotony. The steppe, the steppe, and nothing else; in the distance an ancient grave-mound or a vvindmill; oxcarts laden with coal file by. Birds fly singly low over the plain and the monotonous beat of their wings in- duces a drowsiness. It is hot. An hour or two passes, and still the steppe, the steppe, and still in the distance the grave-mound. The driver rambles on telling you some long-drawn-out, irrelevant tale, frequently pointing at something with his whip, and tranquillity takes posses- sion of your soul, you are loath to think of the past. . . .

A troika had been sent to fetch Vera Ivanovna Kar- dina. The driver put in her bags and started setting the harness to rights.

"Everything is just as it used to be," said Vera, look- ing about her. "I was a little girl when I was here last, some ten years ago. I remember old Boris came to fetch me then. Is he still living?"

The driver made no reply, but gave her a sour, pe- culiarly Ukrainian look and climbed onto the box.

It was a drive of twenty miles from the station, and Vera too yielded to the fascination of the steppe, forgot the past and thought only of how spacious and uncon- fined this region was. Healthy, clever, beautiful, and young—she was only twenty-three—she had hitherto lacked nothing but just this space and freedom.

The steppe, the steppe . . . The horses trotted along, the sun rose higher and higher, and it seemed to Vera that never in her childhood had the steppe been so rich, so luxuriant in June; the field flowers were in bloom, yellow, green, lilac, white, and a fragrance rose from them and from the warmed earth, and there were strange blue birds along the road. Vera had long since lost the habit of praying, but now, struggling with drowsiness, she murmured, "Lord, grant that I may be happy here."

There was a sweet feeling of serenity in her heart, and she felt as though she would have been glad to go on driving like that all her life, looking at the steppe.

Suddenly they reached a deep ravine overgrown with oak saplings and alders. One felt a breath of moisture in the air—there must have been a stream at the bottom. On the near side, at the very edge of the ravine, a flock of partridge rose noisily. Vera remembered that in former days they used to go to this ravine for evening walks; so the house must be near. And now she could actually see the poplars, the barn; black smoke was ris- ing a little way off—they were burning old straw. And there was Aunt Dasha coming to meet her and waving her handkerchief. Grandfather was on the terrace. Oh, dear, what a joyl

"My darling, my darling!" shrieked her aunt as though she were in hysterics. "Our real mistress has come! You understand, you are our mistress, our queen! Here everything is yours! My darling, my beauty, I am not your aunt but your obedient slave!"

Vera had no relatives but her aunt and her grand- father; her mother had long been dead; her father, an engineer, had died three months before in Kazan on his way to Siberia. Her grandfather had a big gray beard, was stout, red-faced and asthmatic, and he thrust out his stomach as he walked leaning on a cane. Her aunt, a lady of forty-two or so, who wore a fashionable dress with sleeves puffed at the shoulders and was tightly laced at the waist, evidently tried to look young and was still anxious to attract men; she walked mincingly, her back twitching as she went.

''Will you love us?" she asked, embracing Vera. "You are not proud?"

In accordance with her grandfather's wish a thanks- giving service was held, then they spent a long while over dinner, and Vera's new life began. She was given the best room, all the rugs in the house were put in it, and a great many flowers; and when at night she lay down in her cozy, wide, very soft bed and covered her- self with a silk quilt that smelled of old clothes long stored away, she laughed out loud with pleasure. Aunt Dasha came in for a minute to wish her good night.

"Here you are home, thank God," she said, sitting down on the bed. "As you see, we are very well off, couldn't be better. There is only one thing: your grand- father is in a bad way! A bad way, indeed. He is short of breath and he is getting senile. And remember how robust, how vigorous he used to bel What a man he was! In former days, if a servant displeased him or any- thing else went wrong, he would jump up at once and shout, 'Twenty-five strokes! Flog him! Hard!' But now he has drawn in his horns and never opens his mouth. And besides, times have changed, darling; one mayn't strike servants nowadays. Of course, why should one? But, on the other hand, they have to be held in."

"And are they beaten now, Auntie?" asked Vera.

"The steward hits them sometimes, but I never do, bless their hearts! And your grandfather sometimes lifts his stick from old habit, but he never strikes them." Aunt Dasha yawned and made the sign of the cross over her mouth and her right ear.

"It isn't dull here?" Vera inquired.

"What shall I say? There are no landowners here- abouts, they don't live here now, but iron works have been built all over the place, darling, and there are lots of engineers, doctors, and mine superintendents. Of course, we have private theatricals and concerts, but most of the time it's cards. They call on us, too. Dr. Neshchapov, from the iron works, comes to see us— such a handsome interesting man! He has fallen in love with your photograph. I made up my mind: he is meant for Verochka. He is young, handsome, well-to-do—a good match, in a word. But of course, you are a fine catch, too. You are of good family; the property is mortgaged, it is true, but it is in good order and not neglected; there is my share in it, but it will all come to you—1 am your obedient slave. And my brother, your late father, has left you fifteen thousand rubles . . • But I see you can't keep your eyes open. Sleep, my child."

The next day Vera spent a long time walking round the house. The garden, which was old and inattractive, lying inconveniently on a slope, had no paths and was completely neglected: it was apparently regarded as superfluous. There were numbers of grass snakes in it. Hoopoes flew about under the trees caUing "Oo-too- toot!" in a tone which suggested that they were trying to remind people of something. At the bottom of the hill there was a stream, overgrown with tall reeds, and half a mile beyond it was the viUage. From the garden Vera went out into the fields; looking into the distance, thinking of her new life on lier native heath, she kept trying to grasp what was in store for her. The spacious- ness, the lovely calm of the steppe, told her that happi- ness was near at hand and that, perhaps, it was here already. In fact, thousands of people would have said: "What happiness to be young, healthy, well-educated and to live on one's own estate!" At the same time, the endless plain, monotonous, without a single living soul, frightened her, and at moments it was clear to her that this quiet green monster would swallow up her life and reduce it to nothingness. She was young, elegant, fond of life; she had graduated from an aristocratic boarding- school, had learned to speak three languages, had read a great deal, had traveled with her father—and could it be that she had done all this only in the end to settle down on a remote farm lost in the steppe, and day after day wander from the garden into the fields and fiom the fields into the garden, having nothing to do, and then sit at home listening to her grandfather's heavy breathing? What could she do? Where could she go? She found no answer, and as she was returning home she doubted whether she would be happy here, and thought that riding from the station was far more in- teresting than living here.

Dr. Neshchapov came over from the iron works. He was a physician, but three years previously he had bought a share in the enterprise and had become one of the partners; and now he no longer looked upon medicine as his chief occupation, though he still prac- ticed. Looking at him, one saw a pale, dark-haired man in a white waistcoat, with a good figure; but to guess what there was in his heart and in his mind was diffi- cult. He kissed Aunt Dasha's hand on greeting her and was continually jumping up to move a chair or give his seat to someone; he was very grave and silent all the while and when he started speaking, it was for some reason impossible to hear and understand his first sen- tence, although he spoke clearly and not too low.

"You play the piano?" he asked Vera, and suddenly jumped up, as she had dropped her handkerchief.

He stayed from midday to midnight without saying anything, and Vera found him very unattractive. It seemed to her that a white waistcoat in the country was in bad taste, and his excessive politeness, his refined manners, and his pale, serious face with dark eyebrows struck her as mawkish; she fancied that he never opened his mouth probably because he was stupid. When he had gone, her aunt said enthusiastically, "Well? Isn't he charming?"

Aunt Dasha managed the property. Tightly laced, jingling bracelets on her wrist, she would walk mincingly into the kitchen, the barn, the cattle yard, her back twitching, and whenever she talked to the steward or to the peasants, for some reason, she would put on her pince-nez. Grandfather always sat in the same place, playing patience or dozing. He ate a very great deal at dinner and supper; he was served a freshly cooked din- ner, as well as leftovers and the cold remnants of Sun- day's pie and salt meat from the servants' dinner, and he ate it all greedily. The impression every dinner made on Vera was such that afterwards when she saw a flock of sheep driven by or flour being brought from the miU, she thought: "Grandfather will eat that." Most of the time he was alent, absorbed in eating or in patience; but it sometimes happened at dinner that, at the sight of Vera, he would get emotional and say tenderly, "My only grandchild! Verochka!"

And tears would glisten in his eyes. Or his face would turn suddenly crimson, his neck would swell, he would look with fury at the servants and, banging his stick, demand, "Why hasn't the horseradish been served?"

In winter he led a completely sedentary existence; in summer he sometimes drove out into the fields to have a look at the oats and the hay; and when he came back he would declare that everything was neglected now with ^rn away, and he rapped his stick.

"Your grandfather is out of humor," Aunt Dasha would whisper. "StiU, it is nothing now. But formerly it was terrible: Twenty-five strokes!' he would shout. 'Flog him! Hard!' "

Aunt Dasha complained that everyone had grown lazy, that no one did anything, and that the estate yielded no income. Indeed, there was no regular farm- ing on the place; they plowed and sowed a little simply from habit and in reality did nothing and lived in idle- ness. And yet all day long there was running to and fro, figuring and worrying. The bustle in the house began at five o'clock in the morning; one heard continually: "Bring it," "Fetch it," "Run an errand," and as a rule by evening the servants were utterly exhausted. Aunt Dasha's cooks and housemaids changed every week; sometimes she discharged them for immorality; some- times they left of their own accord, saying that they were worn out. None of the villagers would come to the house as a servant; it was necessary to hire people from a distance. There was only one girl from the village living in the house, Alyona, and she stayed because her whole family—old women and children—were living on her wages. This Alyona, a pale, rather stupid little thing, spent the whole day doing the rooms, waiting at tables, lighting the stove, sewing, washing; it always seemed as though she were only puttering about, mak- ing a noise with her boots and were nothing but a nuisance in the house. Dreading that she might be dis- missed and sent home, she often dropped and broke the crockery, and they deducted the value of it from her wages, and then her mother and grandmother would come and fall down at Aunt Dasha's feet.

Once a week and sometimes oftener, guests would arrive. Aunt Dasha would come to Vera and say, "You should show yourself to the guests, or they'll think that you are stuck-up."

Vera would go in to the guests and play vint with them for hours together or play the piano while the guests danced. Her aunt, in high spirits and breathless from dancing, would come up and whisper to her, "Be nice to Marya Nikiforovna."

On the 6th of December, St. Nicholas' Day, a lot of guests, about thirty of them, arrived all at once; they played vint until late and many of them stayed the night. In the morning they sat do^ to cards again, then had dinner, and when Vera went to her room after dinner to rest from conversation and tobacco smoke, she found guests there, too, and she almost wept with despair. And when they began to get ready to leave in the evening, so great was her relief to see them go at last that she said, "Do stay a little longer!"

Company wearied and constrained her, yet nearly every day as soon as it began to grow dark something pulled her out of the house and she drove off to visit either the iron works or some landowner in the neigh- borhood, and then there were cards, dancing, forfeits, supper . . . The young people employed in the plants or the mines sometimes sang Little Russian songs and sang them rather well. It made one sad to hear them. Or they all gathered together in one room and talked in the dusk about the mines, the treasure troves, famous grave-mounds. Sometimes it happened that as they were talking in the late hours, a shout of "Help!" was heard. It was a drunken man going home or someone who was being robbed near the pits in the neighborhood. Or else the wind howled in the chimneys, shutters banged, then they would hear the uneasy peals of church bells an- nouncing the beginning of a snowstorm.

At all the evening parties, picnics and dinners, Aunt Dasha was invariably the most interesting woman and Dr. Neshchapov the most interesting man. People living near the iron works or in the country houses did little reading; they played only marches and polkas, and the young people always argued hotly about things they did not understand, and the effect was crude. The argu- ments were loud and heated, but, strange to say, no- where had Vera met people who were as unconcerned and lackadaisical as these. They seemed to have no fatherland, no religion, no public interests. When they talked of literature or discussed some abstract problem, it was obvious from Dr. Neshchapov's face that the matter was of no interest to him whatever, and that for a long, long time he had read nothing and cared to read nothing. Giave and expressionless like a badly painted portrait, forever in his white waistcoat, he was uncommunicative and incomprehensible as before; but the ladies, young and old, thought him interesting, were enthusiastic over his manners and envied Vera whom he apparently found very attractive. And Vera always came away from the visit with a feeling of vexation, vowing inwardly to stay home; but the day passed, eve- ning came and again she hurried off to the iron works. And so it went on almost all winter.

She ordered books and magazines and used to read them in her room. She also read at night in bed. When the clock in the hall struck two or three and her temples were beginning to ache from reading, she sat up in bed and thought: "What shall I do? Where shall I go?" Accursed, galling questions to which there were a num- ber of ready-made answers and in reality none at all.

Oh, how noble, how blessed, how beautiful it must be to serve the people to alleviate their sufferings, to enlighten them! But she, Vera, did not know the people. And how could she approach them? They were alien and uninteresting to her; she could not endure the bad smell of the peasant cabins, the tavern oaths, the un- washed children, the women's talk of illness. To walk over snowdrifts, to freeze, then to sit in the st:i.lng air of the cabin to teach children she did not love, no, she would rather die! And to teach the peasants' children while Aunt Dasha took in rent for the taverns and fined the peasants—what a farce it would have been! What a lot of talk there was of schools, of village libraries, of uni- versal education; but if all these engineers, industrialists, and ladies of her acquaintance had not been hypocrites and had really believed that schooling was necessary, they would not have paid the teachers fifteen rubles a month as they did now and would not have starved them. And all the talk about schools and ignorance— that was only to stifle the voice of conscience, since people were ashamed to fifteen or thirty thousand acres and to be indifferent to the lot of the people. Here the ladies were saying about Dr. Neshchapov that he was a kind man and that he had built a school at the iron works. Yes, he had built a school out of used bricks at a cost of some eight hundred rubles, and they chanted "Long life," to him when the building was consecrated, but there was no chance of his giving up his shares and it certainly never entered his head that the peasants were human beings like himself, and that they too should be taught in universities, not in these wretched factory schools.

And Vera was angry at herself and at everyone else. She took up a book again and tried to read it, but soon afterwards sat down, plunged into thought again. To become a doctor? But to do that you must pass an ex- amination in Latin, besides she had an invincible aver- sion to corpses and illnesses. It would be fine to become a mechanic, a judge, a captain of a ship, a savant, to do something into which she could put all her powers, physical and spiritual, and to be tired out and sleep soundly at night; it would be fine to devote her life to something that would make her an interesting person, able to attract interesting people, to love, to have a real family of her own. But what was she to do? How was she to begin?

One Sunday in Lent her aunt came into her room early in the morning to get her umbrella. Vera was sit- ting up in bed clasping her head in her hands, thinking.

"You ought to drive to church, darling," said her aunt, "or people will think you are an unbeliever."

Vera made no answer.

"I see you are bored, child," said Aunt Dasha, sinking on her knees by the bedside; she adored Vera. "Tell me the truth, are you bored?"

"DreadfuUy."

"My beauty, my queen, I am your obedient slave, I wish you nothing but good and all happiness. Tell me, why don't you want to marry Neshchapov? Whom else do you want, my child? Forgive me, darling, but you can't be so finicky, we are not princes. . . . Time is passing, you are not seventeen. . • . And I don't un- derstand it! He loves you, idolizes you!"

"Oh, heavens," said Vera with vexation, 'how can I tell? He sits there and never opens his mouth."

"He is shy, darling. • • . He is afraid you wiU refuse him."

And when afterwards her aunt had left, Vera stood still in the middle of her room uncertain whether to dress or to go back to bed. The bed was hateful and if one looked out of the window, one saw bare trees, gray snow, hateful jackdaws, pigs that her grandfather would eat . . .

"Yes, really," she thought, "perhaps, I'd better get married!"

m

For two days Aunt Dasha went about with a tear- stained and heavily powdered face, and at dinner she kept sighing and looking at the icon. And it was im- possible to discover what was the trouble. At last she made up her mind, went in to Vera and said in an offhand way, "The fact is, child, we have to pay interest on the bank loan, and the tenant has defaulted on his rent. Allow me to pay it out of the fifteen thousand your papa left you."

Afterwards Aunt Dasha did nothing all day but make cherry jam in the garden. Alyona, her cheeks flushed with the heat, kept running to the garden, to the house, to the cellar. When Aunt Dasha was making jam, her face very serious as though she were performing a re- ligious rite, her sleeves displaying her small, strong, des- potic arms, and the servants running about incessantly, bustling about the jam which others would eat, there was always a feeling of torment in the air.

The garden smelled of hot cherries. The sun had set. The brazier had been carried away, but the pleasant sweetish smell still lingered in the air. Vera sat on a bench in the garden and watched a new hired man, a young soldier on leave who had been passing through the neighborhood and who was, by her orders, making paths. He was cutting the sod with a spade and throw- ing it onto a wheelbarrow.

''Where were you stationed when you were in serv- ice?" Vera asked him.

"At Berdyansk."

"And where are you going now, home?"

"No, ma'am," answered the man, "I have no home."

"But where were you born and raised?"

"In the Province of Orel. Till I went into the army I lived with my mother and stepfather. My mother was a good housewife, and people looked up to her, and I was well-off. But while I was in the army I got a letter saying my mother died . . . and now I don't seem to care to go home. It's not my own father, so it's not my home."

"Is your father dead?"

"I don't know, ma'am. I was born out of wedlock."

At that moment Aunt Dasha appeared at the window and said: "Il ne faut pas parler aux gens. . • . Go into the kitchen, my good man," she said to the soldier; "you can tell your story there."

And then came supper, as it had the previous day and did every day, reading, a sleepless night and end- less thoughts about the same thing. At three o'clock it began to grow light; Alyona was already busy in the- corridor, and Vera was not asleep yet and was trying to read. She heard the creaking of the wheelbarrow: it was the new hired man at work in the garden. She seated herself at the open window with a book and, half-dozing, watched the soldier make paths for her, and that entertained her. The paths were even as a leather strap and level, and it was pleasant to imagine what they would be like when they were strewn with yellow sand.

Soon after five o'clock she saw her aunt come out of the house in a pink dressing-gown and curl-papers. She stood silently on the steps for about three minutes and then said to the soldier:

"Take your passport and go in peace. I can't have anyone in my house who is illegitimate."

Pain and anger wrenched Vera's heart. She was in- dignant with her aunt, she hated her; she was sick of her, she loathed her. But what was she to do? Cut her short? Be rude to her? But what would be the use? Suppose she were to stand up to her, get her out of the way, mado her harmless; suppose she were to prevent her grandfather from raising his stick to strik^—what would be the use? would be like killing one mouse or one snake in the boundless steppe. The vast expanse, the long winters, the monotony and dreariness of life generated a sense of helplessness; the situation seems hopeless, and one wants to do nothing—all is useless.

Alyona came in and, bowing low to Vera, began

carrying out the armchairs to beat the dust out of them.

"A fine time you have chosen to do the room," said Vera, annoyed. "Go away!"

Alyona lost her head and in her terror could not grasp what was wanted of her. She began hurriedly tidying up the top of the chest of drawers.

"Go away, I tell you!" Vera shouted, turning cold; she had never felt so exasperated. "Go away!"

Alyona uttered a sort of birdlike moan and dropped Vera's gold watch on the carpet.

"Get out of here!" shrieked Vera in a voice not her jumping up and trembling all over. "Chase her off, she has worn me out!" she continued, walking rap- idly after Alyona down the passage and stamping her feet. "Get out! The rods! Flog her!"

Then suddenly she came to herself and just as she was, unwashed, uncombed, in her dressing-go^ and bedroom slippers, she rushed out of the house. She ran to the familiar ravine and hid herself there among the bramble bushes so as to see no one and be unseen. Lying there motionless on the grass, she did not weep, she was not horror-stricken, but staring at the sky open- eyed, she reflected coldly and clearly that something had happened which she could never forget and for which she could never forgive herself as long as she lived.

"No, enough, enough!" she thought. "It's time to take myself in hand or there'll be no end to it . . . Enough!"

At midday Dr. Neshchapov drove by the ravine on his way to the manor house. She saw him and quickly decided that she would begin a new life, that she would force herself to begin it, and this decision calmed her. And foUowing the doctor's well-built figure with her eyes, she said as though trying to soften the harshness of her decision, "He is nice. • . . We shall manage a life somehow."

She returned home. While she was dressing, Aunt Dasha came into the room and said, "Alyona upset you, darling; I have sent her home to the village. Her mother thrashed her within an inch of her life and came here crying."

"Auntie," said Vera quickly, "I am going to marry Dr. Neshchapov. Only talk to him yourself . . . I can't."

And again she went out into the fields. And wander- ing aimlessly about, she made up her mind that when she was married she would keep house, doctor the peas- ants, teach school, do all the things that other women of her circle did. And this constant dissatisfaction with herself and everyone else, this succession of bad mis- takes that loom up like a mountain before you when- ever you look back on your past, she would accept as her real life, her destiny, and she would expect nothing better. . . . And indeed, there is nothing better! Glori- ous nature, dreams, music, tell one story, but reality another. Evidently goodness and happiness exist some- where outside of life. . . . It is necessary not to live your separate life, but become at one with this luxurious steppe, boundless and indifferent as eternity, with its flowers, its ancient grave-mounds, and its spaciousness, and then all will be well.

A month later Vera was living at the iron works.

1897

Peasants

IKOLAY CHIKILDEYEV, a waiter in the

Moscow hotel, Slavyansky Bazar, had been taken ill. His legs went numb and his gait became unsteady, so that one day as he was going along the corridor, carry- ing an order of ham and peas on a tray, he stumbled and fell. He had to give up his job. Whatever money he and his wife had was spent on doctors and medicines; they had nothing left to live on; idleness weighed heav- ily upon him and he decided to go back to the village from which he had come. It was easier to be ill at horne, and it was cheaper living there; and not for nothing is it said that there is help in the walls of horne.

He arrived in his native Zhukovo toward evening. In his childhood the house in which he was born figured as a bright, cosy, comfortable place. But now, going into the log cabin, he was positively frightened: it was so dark and crowded and squalid. His wife Olga and his daughter Sasha, who had come with him, stared in bewilderment at the big dirty stove, which occupied almost half the room and was black with soot and flies. What a lot of flies! The stove was lopsided, the logs in the walls sloped, and it looked as though the cabin were about to collapse. In the corner, near the icons, bottle labels and scraps of newspaper were pasted on the walls instead of pictures. The poverty, the povertyI None of the grown-ups were at horne; all were at work, reaping. On the stove sat a flaxen-haired girl of eight, unwashed, apathetic; she did not even look up at the newcomers. Below, a white cat was rubbing itself against the oven fork.

"Pussy, pussy!" Sasha called to it coaxingly. "Pussy!"

"It can't hear," said the little girl; "it's gone deaf."

"Why?"

"Oh, it was hit."

Nikolay and Olga realized at first glance what life was like here, but said nothing to each other; silently they put down their bundles, and silently went out intc the village street. Their cabin was the third from the end and seemed the poorest and oldest-looking; the second was not much better; but the last one had an iron roof and curtains at the windows. That cottage stood apart, and was not enclosed; it was a tavern. The cabins were all in a single row, and the entire little village—quiet and pensive, with willows, elders, and mountain ash peeping out from the courtyards—had a pleasant look.

Behind the peasant homesteads the ground sloped do^ to the river steeply and precipitously, so that huge boulders jutted out here and there through the clay. On the steep slope paths wound among the stones and pits dug by the potters; pieces of broken pottery, brown and red, lay about in heaps, and below there stretched a broad, level, bright-green meadow, already mown, over which the peasants' cattle were now wan- dering. The river, two thirds of a mile from the village, ran, twisting and turning, between beautiful wooded banks. Beyond it was another broad meadow, a herd of cattle, long files of white geese; then, just as on the hither side, there was a steep rise, and at the top of it, on a ridge, a village with a church that had five domes, and, at a little distance, a manor house.

"It's nice here!" said Olga, crossing herself at the sight of the church. "Lord, what space!"

Just at that moment the bells began ringing for ves- pers (it was Saturday evening). Two little girls, down below, who were carrying a pail of water, looked round at the church to listen to the chimes.

"About this time they are serving the dinners at the Slavyansky Bazar," said Nikolay dreamily.

Sitting on the edge of the ravine, Nikolay and Olga watched the sunset, and saw how the gold and crimson sky was reflected in the river, in the church windows, and in the very air, which was soft and still and inex- pressibly pure, as it never was in Moscow. And when the sun had set, the herds went past, bleating and bel- lowing; geese flew across from the other side of the river, and then all was hushed; the soft light faded from the air, and dusk began its rapid descent.

Meanwhile Nikolay's father and mother, two gaunt, bent, toothless old people, of the same height, had re- turned. The daughters-in-law, Marya and Fyokla, who had been working on the estate across the river, came home, too. Marya, the wife of Nikolay's brother Kiryak, had six children, and Fyokla, the wife of his brother Denis, who was in the army, had two; and when Niko- lay, stepping into the cabin, saw the whole family, all those bodies big and little stirring on the sleeping plat- forms, in the cradles and in all the corners, and when he saw the greed with which his old father and the women ate the black bread, dipping it in water, it was borne in upon him that he had made a mistake in coming here, sick, penniless, and with a family, too— a mistake!

"And where is brother Kiryak?" he asked, when they had greeted each other.

"He works as a watchman for a merchant," answered his father; "he stays there in the woods. He ain't a bad worker, but he's too fond of the drink."

"He's no breadwinner," said the old woman tearfully. "Our men are a poor lot; they bring nothing into the house, but take plenty out. Kiryak drinks, and the old man too knows his way to the tavern—it's no use hid- ing the sin. The wrath of the Queen of Heaven is on us."

On account of the guests they heated the samovar. The tea smelt of fish; the sugar was gray and had been nibbled; cockroaches ran about over the bread and the crockery. It was disgusting to drink the tea, and the conversation was disgusting, too—about nothing but poverty and sickness. And before they had emptied their first cups there came a loud, long-drawn-out, drunken shout from the courtyard: "Ma-aryal"

"Looks like Kiryak's coming," said the old man. 'Talk of the devil—"

Silence fell. And after a little while, the shout sounded again, coarse and long-drawn-out, as though it came from under the ground: "Ma-arya!"

Marya, the elder daughter-in-law, turned pale and huddled against the stove, and it was odd to see the look of terror on the face of this strong, broad-shoul- dered, homely woman. Her daughter, the apathetic- looking little girl who had been sitting on the stove, suddenly broke into loud weeping.

"What are you bawling for, you pest?" Fyokla, a handsome woman, also strong and broad-shouldered, shouted at her. "He won't kill her, no fear!"

From the old man Nikolay learned that Marya was afraid to live in the woods with Kiryak, and that when- ever he was drunk he came for her, raised Cain, and beat her mercilessly.

"Ma-arya!" the shout sounded at the very door.

"Help me, for Christ's sake, good people," stammered Marya, breathing as though she were being plunged into icy water. "Help me, good people—"

All the children in the cabin began crying, and af- fected by their example, Sasha, too, began to cry. A drunken cough was heard, and a tall, black-bearded peasant wearing a winter cap came into the cabin, and because his face could not be seen in the dim light of the little lamp, he looked terrifying. It was Kiryak. Go- ing up to his wife, he swung his arm and punched her in the face; stunned by the blow, she did not utter a sound, but sank down, and her nose instantly began bleeding.

"What a shame! What a shame!" muttered the old man, clambering up onto the stove. "Before guests, too! What a sin!"

The old woman sat silent, hunched, lost in thought; Fyokla rocked the cradle.

Evidently aware of inspiring terror, and pleased by it, Kiryak seized Marya by the arm, dragged her to- ward the door, and growled like a beast in order to seem still more terrible; but at that moment he suddenly caught sight of the guests and halted.

"Oh, they have come . . ." he said, letting go of his wife; "my own brother with his family . . ."

Staggering and opening his blood-shot, drunken eyes wide, he muttered a prayer before the icon and went on:

"My dear brother and his family, come to the paren- tal house—from Moscow, I mean. The ancient capital city of Moscow, I mean, mother of cities— Excuse me."

He sank down on the bench near the samovar and began drinking tea, sipping it loudly from the saucer amid general silence. He drank a dozen cups, then lay down on the bench and began to snore.

They started going to bed. Nikolay, being ill, was to sleep on the stove with the old man; Sasha lay down on the floor, while Olga went into the shed with the other women.

"Now, now, dearie," she said, lying-down on the hay beside Marya; "tears won't help. Bear your cross, that's aU. It says in Scripture: 'Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.' . . . Now, now, dearie."

Then, speaking under her breath in a singsong, she told them about Moscow, about her life, how she h::.d been a chambermaid in furnished rooms.

"And in Moscow the houses are big, made of stone," she said; "and there are many, many churches, forty times forty, dearie; and in the houses they're all gentry, so goodlooking and so proper!"

Marya said that not only had she never been to Mos- cow, but had not even been in their own district town; she could neither read nor write, and knew no prayers, not even "Our Father." Both she and Fyokla, her sister- in-law, who was sitting a little way off listening, were exceedingly backward and dull-witted. They both dis- liked their husbands; Marya was afraid of Kiryak, and whenever he stayed with her she shook with fear, and al- ways got a headache from the fumes of vodka and tobacco of which he reeked. And in response to the question whether she did not miss her husband, Fyokla replied sourly:

"Deuce take him!"

They talked a while and then grew silent.

It was cool, and a cock was crowing at the top of his voice near the shed, interfering with sleep. When the bluish morning light was already showing through every crack, Fyokla got up quietly and went out, and then they heard her hurry off somewhere, her bare feet thumping as she ran.

II

Olga went to church, and took Marya with her. As they went down the path toward the meadow both were cheerful. Olga liked the open country, and Marya felt that in her sister-in-law she had found someone near and dear to her. The sun was rising. Low over the meadow hovered a drowsy hawk; the river looked dull; wisps of mist were floating here and there, but on the farther shore a streak of light already lay across the hill; the church was shining, and in the garden attached to the manor the rooks were cawing frantically.

"The old man ain't bad," Marya told her, "but Cranny is strict, and is free with her hand. Our own flour lasted till Carnival, and now we buy it at the tavern; so she's cross; she says we eat too much."

"Now, now, dearie! Bear your cross, that's all. It's written: 'Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden.'"

Olga spoke sedately, in a singsong, and her gait was that of a pilgrim woman, rapid and fidgety. Every day she read the gospel, read it aloud like a deacon; a great deal of it she did not understand, but the sacred phrases moved her to tears, and such words as "behold" and "whosoever" she pronounced with a sweet faintness at her heart. She believed in God, in the Holy Virgin, in the saints; she believed that it was wrong to harm any- one—whether simple folk, or Germans, or gypsies, or Jews—and that misfortune awaited even those who did not pity animals. She believed that this was written in the Scriptures; and so when she pronounced words from Holy Writ, even though she did not understand them, her face softened with emotion, grew compassionate and radiant.

"Where do you come from?" Marya asked her.

"I am from the province of Vladimir. But I was taken to Moscow long ago, when I was eight years old."

They reached the river. On the other side a woman stood at the water's edge, taking off her clothes.

"That's our Fyokla," said Marya, recognizing her. "She's been across the river to the manor yard. She's been with the squire's men. She's a hussy and foul- mouthed—she is that!"

Black-browed Fyokla, her hair undone, still young and with the firm flesh of a girl, jumped off the bank and began thrashing the water with her feet, sen^ng waves in all directions.

"A hussy—she is that!" repeated Marya.

The river was spanned by a rickety little bridge of logs, and below in the clean, clear water shoals of broad- headed chub were swimming. The dew was glistening on the green shrubs that were mirrored in the water. Then the air grew warmer; it was pleasant. What a glorious morning it was! And how glorious life would probably be in this world, were it not for want, horrible, inescapable want, from which you cannot hide any- where! Only to look round at the village was to remem- ber all that had happened the day before, and the speU of the happiness that they thought they felt around them vanished instantly.

They went into the church. Marya stood in the en- trance and did not dare to go farther. Nor did she dare to sit do^ either, though they only began ringing for Mass after eight o'clock. She remained standiag whole time.

While the gospel was being read the crowd suddenly parted to make way for the squire's family. Two young ladies in white frocks and wide-brimmed hats walked in, and with them was a chubby, rosy boy in a sailor suit. Their appearance moved Olga; she concluded at first glance that they were decent, elegant, cultivated people. But Marya glared at them from under her brows, sullenly, dejectedly, as though they were not human beings but monsters who might crush her if she did not move aside.

And every time the deacon intoned in his bass voice, she imagined that she heard the cry, "Ma-arya!" and she shuddered.

m

The arrival of the guests bec^e known in the vil- lage, and directly after Mass a great many people as- sembled in the cabin. The Leonychevs and the Matvei- chevs and the Ilyichovs came to make inquiries about relatives of theirs who had situations in Moscow. All the lads of Zhukovo who could read and write were packed off to Moscow and hired out as bellboys or waiters (just as the lads from the village on the other side of the river all apprenticed to bakers), and this had been the custom from the days of serfdom, long ago, when a cer- tain Luka lvanych, a peasant from Zhukovo, now a legendary figure, who had been a bartender in one of the Moscow clubs, would take none but his fellow vil- lagers into his service, and these in turn, as they got up in the world, sent for their kinsfolk and found jobs for them in taverns and restaurants; and from that time on the village of Zhukovo was known throughout the coun- tryside round about as Flunkeyville or Toadytown. Niko- lay had been taken to Moscow when he was eleven, and gotten a situation by Ivan Makarych, a Matveichev, who was then an attendant at the Hermitage garden restaurant. And now, addressing the Matveichevs, Nik- olay said unctuously:

"Ivan Makarych is my benefactor, and I am bound to pray for him day and night, because it was he who set me on the right path."

"God bless you!" a tall old woman, the sister of Ivan Makarych, said tearfully, "and not a word have we heard about him, the dear man."

"Last winter he was in service at Omon's, and there was a rumor that this season he was somewhere out of town, in a garden restauiant. He has aged! Why, it used to be that he would bring home as much as ten rubles a day in the summertime, but now things are very quiet everywhere. It's hard on the old man."

The women and the old crones looked at Nikolay's feet, shod in felt boots, and at his pale face, and said mournfully:

"You're no breadwinner, Nikolay Osipych; you're no breadwinner! No, indeed!"

And they all fondled Sasha. She was going on eleven, but she was small and very thin, and she looked no more than seven. Among the other little girls, with their sun- burnt faces and roughly cropped hair, and their long, faded shifts, she, with her pallor, her big dark eyes and the red ribbon in her hair, looked droll, as though she were som!'! little wild thing that had been caught in the fields and brought into the cabin.

"She can read, too," said Olga, looking tenderly at her daughter and showing her off. "Read a little, child!" she said, taking the Gospels from the corner. "You read, and the good Christian folk will listen."

It was an old, heavy volume in a leather binding dog-eared edges, and it gave off a smell as though monks had come into the house. Sasha raised her eye- brows and began in a loud singsong:

" 'And when they were departed, behold, the angel of the Lord . . . appeareth to Joseph in a dream, say- ing, Arise, and take the young child and his mother ...' "

" 'The young child and his mother,'" Olga repeated, and flushed all over with emotion.

" 'And flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child, to de- stroy him . . .' "

At these words Olga could not contain herself and burst into tears. Afected by her example, Marya began to whimper, and then Ivan Makarych's sister followed suit. The old man coughed and bustled about looking for a present for his granddaughter, but finding nothing, gave it up with a wave of his hand. And when the read- ing was over the neighbors dispersed to their homes, deeply moved and very much pleased with Olga and Sasha.

Because of the holiday, the family stayed home all day. The old woman, whom her husband, her daughters- in-law, her grandchildren, all alike called Granny, al- ways tried to do everything herself; she lit the stove and heated the samovar with her own hands, even carried the midday meal to the men in the fields, and then com- plained that she was worn out with work. And all the ^rne she fretted for fear that someone should eat a bite too much or that her husband and daughters-in-law should sit idle. Now she would hear the tavern'L:eeper's geese making for her kitchen garden by the back way, and she would run out of the cabin with a long stick and spend half an hour screaming beside her cabbages which were as meager and flabby as herself; again she would imagine that a crow was after her chickens and would rush at it with loud words of abuse. She was cross and full of complaints from morning till night, and often raised such a hubbub that passers-by stopped in the street.

She treated the old man roughly, calling him a lazy- bones and a plague. He was a shiftless, undependable man, and perhaps if she had not been prodding him con- tinually he would not have worked at all, but would just have sat on the stove and talked. He told his son at great length about certain enemies of his, complained of the injuries he suffered every day at the hands of the neighbors, and it was tedious to listen to him.

"Yes," he would hold forth, with his arms akimbo, "yes— A week after the Exaltation of the Cross I sold my hay at thirty kopecks a pood, of my own free will. Yes, well and good. So you see I was taking the hay in the morning of my own free will; I wasn't doing no one no harm. In an unlucky hour I see the village headman, Antip Sedelnikov, coming out of the tavern. 'Where are you taking it, you blank blank?' says he, and fetches me a box on the ear."

Kiryak had a terrible hangover and was ashamed to face his brother.

'What vodka will do! Oh, my God!" he muttered as he shook his throbbing head. "For Christ's sake, for- give me, dear brother and sister; I'm not happy about it myself."

Because it was a holiday, they bought a herring at the tavern and made a soup of the herring head. At midday they sat down to have tea and went on drinking it until they were all perspiring; they looked actually swollen with tea; and then they attacked the soup, all helping themselves out of one pot. The herring itself Granny hid away.

In the evening a potter was firing pots on the slope.

Down below in the meadow the girls got up a round dance and sang songs. Someone played an accordion. On the other side of the river, too, one kiln was going, and the girls sang songs, and in the distance the singing sounded soft and melodious. In and about the tavern the peasants were making a racket. They sang with drunken voices, discordantly, and swore at one another so filthily that Olga could only shudder and repeat:

"Oh, holy saints!"

What amazed her was that the swearing was inces- sant, and that the old men who were near their end were the loudest and most persistent in using this foul language. And the girls and children listened to the swearing without turning a hair; it was evident that they had been used to it from their cradles.

It got to be past midnight, the fire in the kilns on both sides of the river died down, but in the meadow below and in the tavern the merrymaking continued. The old man and Kiryak, both drunk, walking arm in arm, their shoulders jostling, went up to the shed where Olga and Marya were lying.

"Let her be," the old man pleaded; '1et her be— She's a harmless woman— It's a sin—"

"Ma-arya!" shouted Kiryak.

"Let her be— It's a sin— She's not a bad woman."

Both stood there for a minute and then went on.

"I lo-ove the flowers of the fi-ield," the old man burst forth in a high, piercing tenor. "I lo-ove to pick them in the meadows!"

Then he spat, swore filthily, and went into the cabin.

IV

Granny stationed Sasha near her kitchen garden and ordered her to see to it that the geese did not get in. It was a hot August day. The tavernkeeper's geese could get into the kitchen garden by the back way, but at the moment they were seriously engaged: they were picking up oats near the tavern, peacefully chatting together, and only the gander craned his neck as though to see if the old woman were not coming with a stick. Other geese from down below might have trespassed, but they were now feeding far away on the other side of the river, stretching across the meadow in a long white gar- land. Sasha stood about a while, grew bored, and, see- ing that the geese were not coming, went up to the brink of the slope.

There she saw Marya's eldest daughter Motka, who was standing motionless on a huge boulder, staring at the church. Marya had been brought to bed thirteen times, but she liad only six living children, all girls, not one boy, and the eldest was eight. Motka, barefoot and wearing a long shift, was standing in the full sunshine; the sun was blazing down right on her head, but she did not notice it, and seemed as though turned to stone. Sasha stood beside her and said, looking at the church:

"God lives in the church. People have lamps and candles, but God has little green and red and blue icon- lamps like weeny eyes. At night God walks about the church, and with Him the Holy Mother of God and Saint Nicholas—clump, clump, clump they go! And the watchman is scared, so scared! Now, now, dearie," she added, imitating her mother. "And when the end of the world comes, all the churches will fly up to heaven."

"With the be-elfri-ies?" Motka asked in a deep voice, drawling ^^ syllables.

"With the belfries. And when the end of the world comes, the good people will go to Paradise, but the wicked will b^ro in fire eternal and unquenchable, dearie. To my mama and to Marya, too, God will say: 'You never harmed anyone, and so you go to the right, to Paradise'; but to Kiryak and Granny He will say: 'You go to the left, into the fire.' And the ones who ate for- bidden food on fast days will be sent into the fire, too."

She looked up at the sky, opening her eyes wide, and said:

"Look at the sky and don't blink and you wiU se angels."

Motka began looking at the sky, too, and a minute passed in silence.

"Do you see them?" asked Sasha.

"I don't," said Motka in her deep voice.

"But I do. Little angels are flying about the sky and go flap, flap with their little wings like midges."

Motka thought for a while, with her eyes on the ground, and asked:

"Will Granny burn?"

"She will, dearie.''

From the boulder down to the very bottom there was a smooth, gentle slope, covered with soft green grass, which one longed to touch with one's hands or to lie upon.

Sasha lay down and rolled to the bottom. Motka, with a grave, stern face, and breathing heavily, followed suit, and as she did so, her shift rolled up to her shoulders.

"What fun!" said Sasha, delighted.

They walked up to the top to roll down again, but just then they heard the familiar, shrill voice. Oh, how a^fol it was! Granny, toothless, bony, hunched, her short gray hair flying in the wind, was driving the geese out of the kitchen garden with a long stick, screaming.

"They have trampled all the cabbages, the cursed creatures! May you croak, you thrice accursed plagues! Why don't the devil take you!"

She saw the little girls, threw do^ the stick, picked up a switch, and, seizing Sasha by the neck with her fingers, dry and hard as spikes, began whipping her. Sasha cried with pain and fear, while the gander, wad- dling and craning his neck, went up to the old woman and hissed something, and when he went back to his flock all the geese greeted him approvingly with a "Ga- ga-gal" Then Granny proceeded to whip Motka, and so Motka's shift was rolled up again. In despair and cry- ing loudly, Sasha went to the cabin to complain. Motka followed her; she, too, was crying, but on a deeper note, without wiping her tears, and her face as wet as though it had been dipped in water.

"Holy Fathers!" cried Olga, dismayed, as the two came into the cabin. "Queen of Heaven!"

Sasha began telling her story, when Granny walked in with shrill cries and abuse; then Fyokla got an^y, and there was a hubbub in the house.

"Never mind, never mind!" Olga, pale and distressed, tried to comfort the children, stroking Sasha's head. "She's your grandmother; it's a sin to be cross with her. Never mind, child."

Nikolay, who was already worn out by the continual clamor, the hunger, the sickening fumes, the stench, who already hated and despised the poverty, who was ashamed of his father and mother before his wife and daughter, s^ng his legs off the stove and said to his mother in an irritable, tearful voice:

"You shouldn't beat her! You have no right to beat her!"

"You're ready to croak there on the stove, you loafer!" Fyokla snapped at him spitefuUy. "The devil has brought you here, you spongers!"

Sasha and Motka and all the little girls in the house- hold huddled into a corner on top of the stove behind Nikolay's back, and from there listened to all this in silence and terror, and one could hear the beating of their little hearts. When there is someone in a family who has long been ill, and hopelessly il, there come terrible moments when aU those close to him timidly, secretly, at the bottom of their hearts wish f.or his death, and only the children fear the death of someone close to them, and always feel horrified at the thought of it. And now the little girls, with bated breath and a mournful look on their faces, stared at Nikolay and thought that he would soon die; and they wanted to cry and to say something friendly and compassionate to him.

He was pressing close to Olga, as though seeking her protection, and saying to her softly in a shaking voice:

"Olya dear, I can't bear it here any longer. I haven't the strength. For Christ's sake, for the sake of God in heaven, write to your sister, Klavdia Abramovna. Let her seU and pawn everything she has; let her send us the money, and we'll go away from here. Oh, Lord," he went on with anguish, "to have one peep at Moscow! To see mother Moscow, if only in my dreams!"

And when evening came, and it was dark in the cabin, it got so dismal that it was hard to bring out a word. Granny, cross as ever, soaked some crusts of rye bread in a cup, and was a whole hour sucking at them. Marya, having milked the cow, brought in a pail of milk and set it on a bench; then Granny poured it from the pail into jugs slowly and deliberately, evidently pleased that it was now the Fast of Assumption, so that no one would drink milk and all of it would be left untouched. And she only poured out just a little into a saucer for Fyokla's baby. When she and Marya carried the jugs down to the ceUar, Motka suddenly came to life, slipped downwn from the stove, and going to the bench where the wooden cup full of crusts was standing, splashed some milk from the saucer into it.

Granny, coming back into the cabin, attacked her soaked crusts again, while Sasha and Motka sat on the stove, staring at her, and were glad that she had taken forbidden food and now was sure to go to hell. They were comforted and lay down to sleep, and as she dozed off, Sasha pictured the Last Judgment to herself: a fire was burning in a stove something like a potter's kiln, and the Evil One, with horns like a cow's and black all over, was driving Granny into the fire with a long stick, just as Granny herself had driven the geese.

v

On the Feast of Assumption, after ten o'clock at night, the girls and boys who were making merry down in the meadow suddenly began to scream and shout, and ran in the direction of the village; and those who were sitting on the brink of the slope at first could not make out what was the matter.

"Fire! Fire!" desperate shouts sounded from below. "The place is on fire!"

Those who were sitting above looked back and a terrible and extraordinary spectacle presented itself to them. From the thatched roof of one of the last cabins in the village rose a pillar of flame, seven feet high, which coiled and scattered sparks in all directions as though it were a fountain playing. And all at once the whole roof burst into bright flame, and the crackling of the fire was heard.

The moonlight was dimmed, and now the whole vil- lage was enveloped in a quivering red glow: black shadows moved over the ground, there was a smell of burning, and those who ran up from below were all gasping and trembling so that they could not speak; they jostled each other, fell down, and, unaccustomed to the bright light, could hardly see and did not recognize each other. It was terrifying. What was particularly frightening was that pigeons were flying in the smoke above the flames, and that in the tavern, where they did not yet know of the fire, people were still singing and playing the accordion as though nothing was wrong.

"Uncle Semyon's place is on fire," someone shouted in a loud, coarse voice.

Marya was rushing about near her cabin, weeping and wringing her hands, her teeth chattering, though the fire was a long way off, at the other end of the vil- lage. Nikolay came out in felt boots, the children ran about in their little shifts. Near the village policeman's cabin an iron sheet was struck. Boom, boom, boom! floated through the air, and this rapid, incessant sound sent a pang to the heart and turned one cold. The old women stood about, holding the icons. Sheep, calves, cows were driven out of the courtyards into the street; chests, sheepskins, tubs were carried out. A black stal- lion, that was kept apart from the drove of horses be- cause he kicked and injured them, was set free and ran back and forth through the village once or twice, neigh- ing and pawing the ground, then suddenly stopped short near a cart and started kicking it with his hind legs.

The bells in the church on the other side of the river began ringing.

Near the burning cabin it was so hot and so bright that every blade of grass on the ground was distinctly visible. On one of the chests that they had managed to carry out sat Semyon, a carrot-haired peasant with a long nose, wearing a jacket and a cap pulled down over his ears; his wife was lying face down, unconscious and moaning. A little old man of eighty with a big beard, who looked like a gnome, a stranger to the village, but apparently connected in some way with the fire, walked about near it, bareheaded, with a white bundle in his arms. The flames were reflected on his bald spot. The village headman, Antip Sedelnikov, as swarthy and black-haired as a gypsy, went up to the cabin with an ax, and hacked out the windows one after another—no one knew why—and then began chopping up the porch.

"Women, water!" he shouted. "Bring the enginel Shake a leg!"

The peasants who had just been carousing in the tavern were dragging up the engine. They were all drunk; they kept stumbling and falling down, and all had a helpless expression and tears in their eyes.

"Girls, water!" shouted the headman, who was drunk, too. "Shake a leg, girls!"

The women and the girls ran downhill to a spring, and hauled pails and tubs of water up the hill, and, after pouring it into the engine, ran down again. Olga and Marya and Sasha and Motka, too, all carried water. The women and the boys pumped the water; the hose hissed, and the headman, directing it now at the door, now at the windows, held back the stre^ with his finger, which made it hiss yet more sharply.

"He's a top-notcher, Antip is!" voices shouted approv- ingly. "Keep it up!"

Antip dove into the burning cabin and shouted from within.

"Pump! Lend a hand, good Orthodox folk, on the occasion of such a terrible accident!"

The peasants stood round in a crowd, doing nothing and staring at the fire. No one knew what to do, no one knew how to do anything, and there were stacks of grain and hay, piles of faggots, and sheds all about.

Kiryak and old Osip, his father, both tipsy, stood there, too. And, as though to justify his inaction, old Osip said to the woman lying on the ground:

"Why carry on so, friend? The cabin's insured—why worry?"

Semyon, addressing himself now to one person, now to another, kept telling how the fire had started.

"That same old man, the one with the bundle, a house-serf of General Zhukov's— He was cook at our general's, God rest his soul! He came over this evening: 'Let me stay the night,' says he. Well, we had a glass, to be sure. The wife got busy with the samovar—we were going to give the old man some tea, and in an un- lucky hour she set the samovar in the entry. And the sparks from the chimney blew straight up to the thatch; well, that's how it was. We were nearly burnt up our- selves. And the old man's cap got burnt up; it's a shame!"

And the sheet of iron was struck tirelessly, and the bells of the church on the other side of the river kept ringing. Ruddy with the glow, and breathless, Olga, looking with horror at the red sheep and at the pink pigeons flying through the smoke, kept running downwn the slope and up again. It seemed to her that the ring- ing had entered her soul like a sharp thorn, that the fire would never be over, that Sasha was lost. . . . And when the ceiling of the cabin fell in with a crash, the thought that now the whole village was sure to burn down made her faint, and she could no longer go on carrying water, but sat down on the edge of the slope, setting the buckets near her; beside her and below her, the peasant women sat wailing as though at a wake.

Then, from the village across the river, came men in two carts, bringing a fire-engine with them. A very young student, his white tunic wide open, rode up on horseback. There was the sound of axes. A ladder was placed against the burning frame of the house, and five men ran up it at once, led by the student, who was red in the face and shouted in a harsh, hoarse voice, and in the tone of one who was used to putting out fires. They pulled the house to pieces, a log at a time; they took apart the stable and the wattled fence, and removed the near-by stack of hay.

"Don't let them smash things!" cried stem voices in the crowd. "Don't let them."

Kiryak made his way to the cabin with a resolute air, as though he meant to prevent the newcomers from smashing things, but one of the workmen turned him round and hit him on the neck. There was the sound of laughter, the workman struck him again, Kiryak fell and crawled back into the crowd on all fours.

Two pretty girls in hats, probably the student's sisters, came from the other side of the river. They stood at a distance, looking at the fire. The logs that had been pulled away were no longer burning, but were smoking badly; the student, who was working the hose, turned the stream first on the logs, then on the peasants, then on the women who were hauling the water.

"Georges!" the girls called to him reproachfully and anxiously, "Georges!"

The fire was over. And only when the crowd began to disperse they noticed that day was breaking, that aU were pale and rather dark in the face, as people always appear in the early morning when the last stars are fad- ing. As they separated, the peasants laughed and cracked jokes about General Zhukov's cook and his cap which had been burnt; they already wanted to turn the fire into a jest, and even seemed sorry that it had been put out so soon.

"You were good at putting out the fire, sir!" said Oiga

334 the portable chekhov

to the student. "You ought to come to us in Moscow:

there we have a fire 'most every day."

"Why, do you come from Moscow?" asked one of the young ladies.

"Yes, miss. My husband was employed at the Slavyan- sky Bazar. And this is my daughter," she said, pointing to Sasha, who was chilly and huddled up to her. "She is a Moscow girl, too."

The two young ladies said some^^g in French to the student and he gave Sasha a twenty-kopeck piece.

Old Osip noticed this, and a gleam of hope came into his face.

"We must thank God, your honor, there was no wind," he said, addressing the student, "or else we should have been all burnt out in no time. Your honor, kind gentlefolk," he added, with embarrassment in a lower tone, "the dawn's chilly . . . something to warm a man . . . half a bottle to your honor's health."

He was given nothing, and clearing his throat, he sh^Hed off towards home. Afterwards Olga stood on the edge of the slope and watched the two carts fording the river and the gentlefolk walking across the meadow; a carriage was waiting for them on the other side of the river. Going into the cabin, she said to her husband with enthusiasm:

"Such kind people! And so good-looking! The young ladies were like cherubs!"

"May they burst!" Fyokla, who was sleepy, said spite- fully.

VI

Marya thought herself unhappy, and often said that she longed to die; Fyokla, on the contrary, found every- thing in this life to her taste: the poverty, the filth, the incessant cursing. She ate whatever was given her in- discriminately, slept anywhere and on whatever came to hand. She would empty the slops just at the porch, would splash them out from the doorsill, and then walk barefoot through the puddle. And from the very first day she conceived a hatred for Olga and Nikolay just because they did not like this life.

"I'll see what you'll eat here, you Moscow gentry!" she would say maliciously. "I'l see!"

One morning at the beginning of September Fyokla, vigorous, good-looking, and rosy from the cold, brought up two pails of water from do^ below on a yoke; Marya and Olga were just then sitting at the table, hav- ing tea.

"Enjoy your tea!" said Fyokla sarcastically. "The fine ladies!" she added, setting do^ the pails. "They've got- ten into the habit of tea every day. You'd better look out you don't swell up with your tea-drinking," she went on, looking at Olga with hatred. "She's come by her fat mug in Moscow, the tub of lard!"

She swung the yoke and hit Olga a blow on the shoul- der so that the two sisters-in-law could only strike their hands together and say:

"Oh, holy saints!"

Then Fyokla went do^ to the river to wash the clothes, swearing all the time so loudly that she could be heard in the house.

The day passed and then came the long autumn eve- ning. They wound silk in the cabin; everyone did it ex- cept Fyokla; she had gone across the river. They got the silk from a factory near by, and the whole family work- ing together earned a mere trifle, some twenty kopecks a week.

"Under the masters things were better," said the old man as he wound silk. "You worked and ate and slept, everything in its turn. At dinner you had shchi and kasha, and at supper the same again. Cuc^bers and cabbage galore: you could eat to your heart's content, as much as you liked. And there was more strictness. Everyone knew his place."

The cabin was lighted by a single little lamp, which burned dimly and smoked. When someone stood in front of the lamp and a large shadow fell across the window, one noticed the bright moonlight. Speaking unhurriedly, old Osip related how people used to live before the Emancipation; how in these very parts, where life was now so poverty-stricken and dreary, they used to hunt with harriers, greyhounds, and specially trained stalkers, and the peasants who were employed as beaters got vodka; how caravans loaded with slaugh- tered fowls were sent to Moscow for the young masters; how the serfs that were bad were beaten with rods or sent off to the Tver estate, while those who were good were rewarded. And Granny, too, had something to tell. She remembered everything, absolutely everything. She told about her mistress, a kind, God-fearing woman, whose husband was a boozer and a rake, and all of whose daughters made wretched marriages: one mar- ried a drunkard, another a commoner, a third eloped (Granny herself, a young girl at the time, had helped with the elopement) , and they had all three soon died of grief, as did their mother. And remembering all this, Granny actually shed a tear.

Suddenly someone knocked at the door, and they aU started.

"Uncle Osip, put me up for the night."

The little bald old man, General Zhukov's cook, the very one whose cap had been burnt, walked in. He sat down and listened. Then he, too, began to reminisce and tell stories. Nikolay, sitting on the stove with his legs hanging down, listened and asked questions about the dishes that were prepared for the gentry in the old days. They talked about chops, cutlets, various soups and sauces, and the cook, who remembered everything very well, mentioned dishes that are no longer prepared; there was one, for instance—a dish made of bulls' eyes, that was called "Waking up in the morning."

"And did you have cutlets ^rechal then?" asked Nikolay.

"No."

Nikolay shook his head scornfully and said:

"Ah-hl Fine cooks you were!"

The little girls, who were sitting or lying on the stove, stared downwn without blinking; there seemed to be a lot of them, like cherubs in the clouds. They liked the stories; they sighed and shuddered and turned pale with rapture or terror, and to Granny, whose stories were the most interesting of all, they listened breathlessly, afraid to stir.

They lay down to sleep in silence; and the old people, stirred up and troubled by their reminiscences, thought what a fine thing it was to be young: youth, whatever it may have been like, left nothing in the memory but what was buoyant, joyful, touching; and death, they thought, how terribly cold was death, which was not far off—better not think of it! The little lamp went out. The darkness, and the two little windows brightly lit by the moon, and the stillness and the creak of the cradle, for some reason made them think of nothing but that life was over and that there was no way of bringing it back. You doze off, you sink into obliviousness, and suddenly someone touches your shoulder or breathes on your cheek—and sleep is gone; your body feels numb, as though circulation had stopped, and thoughts of death keep coming into your head. You turn on the other side: you forget about death, but old, dull, dismal thoughts of want, of fodder, of how dear flour is getting, stray through the mind, and a little later you remember again that life is over and there is no way of bringing it back. . . .

"Oh, Lordl" sighed the cook.

Someone rapped gently, ever so gently, at the win- dow. It must have been Fyokla, come back. Olga got up, and yawning and whispering a prayer, unlocked the door, then pulled the bolt of the outer door. But no one came in; only there was a cold draft of air from the street and the entry suddenly grew bright with moon- light. Through the open door could be seen the silent, deserted street, and the moon itself floating across the sky.

'Who's there?" called Olga.

"Me," came the answer, "it's me."

Near the door, hugging the wall, stood Fyokla, stark naked. She was shivering with cold, her teeth were chattering, and in the bright moonlight she looked very pale, strange, and beautiful. The shadows and the bright spots of moonlight on her skin stood out sharply, and her dark eyebrows and firm, young breasts were defined with peculiar distinctness.

"The ruffians over there stripped me and turned me out like this," she muttered. "I had to go home without my clothes—mother-naked. Bring me something to put on."

"But come inside," Olga said softly, beginning to shiver, too.

"I don't want the old folks to see." Cranny was, in fact, already stirring and grumbling, and the old man asked: "Who's there?" Olga brought out her own shift and skirt, dressed Fyokla, and then both went softly into the house, trying to close the door noiselessly.

"Is that you, you slick one?" Cranny grumbled an- grily, guessing who it was. "Curse you, you nightwalkerl Why don't the devil take youl"

"It's all right, it's all right," whispered Olga, wrapping Fyokla up; "it's all right, dearie."

All was quiet again. They always slept badly; each one was kept awake by something nagging and per- sistent: the old man by the pain in his back, Granny by anxiety and malice, Marya by fear, the children by itch and hunger. Now, too, their sleep was restless; they kept turning from one side to the other, they talked in their sleep, they got up for a drink.

Fyokla suddenly burst out into a loud, coarse howl, but checked herself at once, and only sobbed from time to time, her sobs growing softer and more muffled until she was still. Occasionally from the other side of the river came the sound of the striking of the hours; but the clock struck oddly—first five and then three.

"Oh, Lordl" sighed the cook.

Looking at the windows, it was hard to tell whether the moon was still shining or whether it was already da^. Marya got up and went out, and could be heard milking the cows and saying, "Stea-dy!" Granny went out, too. It was still dark in the cabin, but already one could distinguish all the objects in it.

Nikolay, who had not slept all night, got do^ from the stove. He took his dress-coat out of a green chest, put it on, and going to the window, stroked the sleeves, fingered the coat-tails—and smiled. Then he carefully removed the coat, put it away in the chest, and lay do^ again.

Marya came in again and started to light the stove. She was evidently half asleep and was waking up on her feet. She must have had some dream, or perhaps the

stories of the previous night came into her mind, for

she stretched luxuriously before the stove and said:

"No, freedom is better!"

VII

"The master" arrived—that was what they caUed the district police inspector. When he would come and what he was coming for had been known for a week. There were only forty households in Zhukovo, but they had accumulated more than two thousand rubles of arrears in Zemstvo and other taxes.

The police inspector stopped at the tavern. There he drank two glasses of tea, and then went on foot to the headman's house, near which a crowd of tax defaulters stood waiting. The headman, Antip Sedelnikov, in spite of his youth—he was only a little over thirty—was strict and always sided with the authorities, though he him- self was poor and remiss in paying his taxes. Apparently he enjoyed being headman, and liked the sense of power, which he could only display by harshness. At the village meetings he was feared and obeyed. Occasion- ally he would pounce on a drunken man in the street or ncar the tavern, tie his hands behind him, and put him in jail. Once he even put Granny under arrest and kept her in the lock-up for a whole day and a night be- cause, coming to the village meeting instead of Osip, she started to curse. He had never lived in a city or read a book, but somewhere or other he had picked up various bookish expressions, and loved to employ them in conversation, and people respected him for this al- though they did not always understand him.