Chapter I

The sky had been silvery with stars all night long, the fields beyond the garden and the threshing floor was darkling evenly, and the wind-mill, with the two horns of its wings, showed sharply black against the clear horizon. But the stars gave out sparks, trembling, frequently cutting the sky with narrow green streaks; the garden was fitfully murmurous, and already chill autumn could be heard in its murmurings. From the direction of the mill, from the sloping plain, from the desolated stubble-field, a strong wind was blowing.

The farm hands had sated themselves at supper,--it was the holiday of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin,--and had avidly smoked their fill on their way through the garden to the threshing barn. Having thrown on their long great coats, tight at the waist, and falling in folds over their short sheepskin coats, they were going there to sleep, to guard the heaps of grain. Following behind the farm hands, dragging a pillow, walked the master’s son, a tall high-school student, with three white _borzoi_ hounds running at his heels. Upon the threshing floor, in the fresh wind, there was a pleasant smell of chaff, of new rye straw. They all lay down comfortably in it, in the very biggest stack of all, as near as possible to the piles of grain and the corn kiln. The dogs fussed about, rustled for a while at the feet of the workers, and also quieted down.

Over the heads of the recumbent men the broad Milky Way, dividing into two smokily-translucent branches, glimmered whitely and faintly, filled with the fine star dust suspended within them. It was quiet and warm in the straw. But a north-east wind, again and again, ran disquietingly through the brushwood that was darkling along the ditch to the left, with its rampart of earth; and increasing, it neared with an inimical noise. Then a cool breath would reach the face, the hands, together with a bad odour from the lanes between the heaps of grain. And over the horizon, beyond the irregular black blotches of the brushwood, icy diamonds vividly flared up; the Capella was bursting into vari-coloured fires.

Having settled down, they all shut their eyes, after a yawning spell. The wind was dreamily rustling the prickling straws that stuck out above their heads. But its coolness reached their faces, and they all felt that they did not want to sleep as yet,--they had slept their fill after dinner. The high-school student alone was languishing from a sweet longing for sleep. But the fleas would not let him sleep. He started scratching, let his thoughts run on wenches, on the widow through whom he, with the help of the farm hand Pashka, had lost his innocence that very summer, and he also became broad awake.

This student was a thin, awkward stripling with an unusually soft colouring--his face was so white that even sunburn had no effect upon it; he was blue-eyed, with outrageously big hands and feet, with a big Adam’s-apple. He had not parted company with the farm hands all summer,--at first he had carted manure, then the sheaves; he put in order the piles of grain, he smoked an atrocious cheap tobacco, he imitated the _moujiks_ in speech and in his roughness with wenches, who always started laughing at him in chorus, greeting him with catcalls and cries of “Veretenkin! Veretenkin!”[7]--a stupid nickname invented by Ivan, who was a helper at the threshing machine. He passed his nights now at the threshing floor, now in the horse stable; he did not change his linen and his canvas clothes for weeks at a time, nor would he take off his tarred boots; he raised blood-blisters on his feet, unaccustomed to coarse foot-cloths; he lost all the buttons on his summer uniform overcoat, which had been soiled by wheels and manure, had broken the letters and the little silver leaves on his uniform cap.

[7] “Spindle-Shanks! Spindle-Shanks!” _Trans._

“He has broken away from the house entirely!” his mother would say of him, with a caressing, kindly regret, enraptured even by his defects. “Of course, he’ll pick up, become stronger,--but just look what a matted choate he is,--he doesn’t even wash his neck!” she would say, smiling to her guests and pulling his soft, chestnut locks, trying to get at the soft little spiral, curling like a girl’s, at the nape of his neck,--dark, contrasting with the childishly white flesh visible under the blouse that buttoned at the side, contrasting with the large vertebræ under the fine, smooth skin. But he would sulkily turn his head away from under her caressing hand, frowning and blushing. He grew not by the day but by the hour, and as he walked he stooped, whistling meditatively, angularly lumbering from side to side. He still ate linden blossoms and the gum of cherry trees; he carried, although by now secretly, a sling shot to shoot sparrows with, but he would have been consumed with shame had this been revealed, and he constantly kept his hands in his pockets. Only last winter he had played Redskins with his little sister Lily. But in the spring, when through all the streets of the town streams were running and shimmering with a blinding dazzle; when the white window-sills in the class-rooms were aflame with the sun; when the teacher’s room was shot through and through with the sun, and the principal’s cat was lying in ambush for the first finches in the high-school garden, still filled with silvery snow,--in the spring he had gotten the notion that he had fallen in love with the slender little Youshkova, a bookish, serious-minded high-school girl; he had struck up a close friendship with Simashko, a spectacled six-termer, and had determined to dedicate his entire summer vacation to self-culture. But in the summer his dreams about self-culture were already forgotten; a new resolve was taken,--to study the common people; which resolve had soon passed into a passionate infatuation with the _moujiks_.

On the evening before the Assumption, the high-school boy was heavy with sleep while still at supper. Toward the end of every day, when his head would grow heavy and fall down on his chest,--from fatigue, from talking with the farm hands, from his rôle of a grown-up,--his boyishness returned: he wanted to play a bit with Lily, to have a brief reverie, before falling asleep, of some distant and unknown lands, of extraordinary manifestations of passion and self-sacrifice, of the lives of Livingston and Baker, and not of the _moujiks_ written about by Naumov and Nephedov, whom he had given his word of honour to Simashko to read; he wanted to sleep, for at least one night, at home, instead of getting up before the sun, in the cold morning light, when even dogs yawn and stretch so languorously.... But the maid entered, saying that the farm hands had already gone to the threshing floor. Without listening to his mother’s calls, the high-school lad threw his uniform overcoat with its bobbing belt over his shoulders, and put on his cap; grabbing the pillow out of the maid’s hands, he caught up with the farm hands in the lane. He staggered from drowsiness as he walked, dragging the pillow by a corner, and, as soon as he had stumbled up to the heap of straw and had crawled under an old raccoon overcoat lying there, he sailed off into some sweet, black darkness. But the tiny dog-fleas began to burn him as with fire; the farm hands began talking among themselves....

There were five of them: Khomut,[8] a kindly, shaggy old man; Kiriushka, a lame, white-eyed, irresponsible lad, who gave himself up to a childish vice, which fact everybody knew and which made Kiriushka still more irresponsible, making him bear in silence all sorts of jeers about his short leg, twisted at the knee; Pashka, a good-looking _moujik_ of twenty-four and recently married; Theodot, an elderly _moujik_, from another region, somewhere near Liebedyana, nick-named Postnii;[9] and Ivan,--a very stupid fellow, but one who deemed himself an amazingly clever, cunning, and mercilessly-scoffing man. This last held in contempt all work, save work with agricultural machines; he wore a blue blouse and had impressed everybody with the idea that he was a born machinist, although everybody knew that he did not know a blamed thing about the construction of even a simple winnowing machine. He was always narrowing his morosely-ironic little eyes and pursing up his thin lips, never letting a pipe out of his teeth. He generally kept a portentous silence; but whenever he did speak, it was only to annihilate somebody or something with a comment or a nick-name. He scoffed at absolutely everything: at sense and folly, at simplicity and slyness, at despondency and laughter; at God and his own mother, at the gentry and the _moujiks_. The nick-names he bestowed were absurd and incomprehensible, but he uttered them with such an enigmatic air that it seemed to everybody that they had both a meaning and a caustic aptness. He had not spared even himself, and had given himself a nick-name: “Rogojkin,”[10] he had said once in reference to himself, hinting at something so weightily, so maliciously, that everybody rolled from laughter, and afterwards he was never known as anything but Rogojkin. He had christened the high-school student as well, had said something nonsensical about him as well: “Veretenkin.”

[8] “Horse-collar.” _Trans._

[9] “Lenten.” _Trans._

[10] “Made out of matting.” _Trans._

The school-boy,--so he thought,--had come to know these people well during the summer, had become attached to all of them in different ways,--even to Ivan, who unmercifully made fun of him. He was learning one thing or another from them, was adapting their pronunciation,--absolutely, as it proved, unlike the speech of the _moujiks_ in books; adopting their unexpected, absurd, but unshakable conclusions, the uniformity of their ready wisdom, their coarseness and indifference, their capacity for work and their dislike of it. And, had he gone to the city after the vacation, without reverting to his infatuation for the life of the _moujiks_ during the next summer, he would all his life have thought that he had observed the common people of Russia very well,--if, by accident, a lengthy, frank conversation had not sprung up among the farm hands on this night.

It was started by the old man who was lying alongside of the school-boy and who was scratching more than anybody else.

“Pestering the life out of you, young master, hey? They’re nothing but a misery, Khomut!” said he,--the word “Khomut” he used to characterize not only his entire existence, but also all its weariness, all its unpleasantness.

“Can’t stand it,” replied the school-boy. “The women and wenches now, the devil take them, they won’t touch. But who would you think they ought to be biting if not them?”

“Main thing is, whether a body wear drawers or no, it makes no difference to them fleas,” indifferently agreed the old man, giving off, as he tossed about, a strong odour,--of a body long unwashed, and of a worn peasant’s coat that had become permeated with the smoke of a chimneyless hut.

The others kept silence. Usually, they were jocose before falling asleep, questioning Pashka about his conjugal life, while he answered them with such unperturbed and gay shamelessness that even the school-boy, who was constantly entranced by him, never taking his eyes off his intelligent and animated face, was vexed over any one’s being able to speak so of one’s own young wife. Now no one seemed about to begin questioning, and the student wanted to do so himself, in order to excite his imagination, forever empoisoned by the widow, and to hear the self-assured voice of Pashka,--when the latter stretched himself, sat up, and began rolling a crude cigarette. The old man raised up his head, covered with a cap, and shook it.

“Eh, but you’ll burn this place down some day, young fellow!” said he. “Watch out. It don’t take much to bring on trouble.”

“Well, I’ll get out of it by blamin’ the young master,” answered Pashka, a trifle hoarse from a cold; and, having cleared his throat, he started laughing. “He’s smoking all the time himself. Wonderful night to-night, young master,” said he, changing his tone to a serious one and turning around to the school-boy. “What’s the only thing lacking on this night, you might say? Why, the moon.”

They all felt that he wanted to tell something. And, truly, having kept silent for a while, without eliciting any reply, he suddenly added:

“Are you asleep, young master? What hour might it be now?”

The school-boy raised himself up, pulled his silver watch out of his trousers’-pocket, and began inspecting it by the light of the stars.

“Half-past ten,” said he, bending over.

“Well, now, I just knew it was that,” concurred Pashka, gaily and self-assuredly, lighting his cigarette, which was rolled somewhat in the form of a pipe; it was gripped in one corner of his mouth between his teeth, and he lit it with a stinking sulphur match flaming within his cupped hands. “Just exactly at this time last year I killed a man.”

And the school-boy at once straightened up, letting his hands drop,--and he seemed to be turned to stone during all the time that the others talked. At rare intervals he would put in a word, but it was as though it were not he, but some other who was talking in his stead. Then everything within him began to shiver in an icy ague fit inducive of senseless laughter, and his face began to burn, as though it were aflame.