Chapter IX: Part THREE: I (2)

And Syery sat there on the bench for a long time, without removing his cap. And the mere sight of his cottage in the twilight made one sad at heart. In the twilight, beyond the broad snow-covered ravine, Durnovka lay in melancholy blackness, with its grain-ricks and bushes in the back yards. But when darkness fully descended, and the little lights began to twinkle, it seemed as if all were peaceful and cosy in the cottages. Syery’s hut alone remained disagreeably black. It was dull, dead. Kuzma knew all about it: if you entered its half-open ante-room, you felt almost as if you were on the threshold of some wild beast’s lair. There was an odour of snow; through the holes in the roof the gloomy sky was visible; the wind rustled the manure and the dry branches which had been tossed at haphazard upon the rafters; if, by feeling about, you found the slanting wall and opened door, you would encounter cold, darkness, a frost-covered little window barely discernible through the gloom. No one was to be seen, but one could guess how things were: the master of the house was sitting on the bench--his pipe glowed with a tiny fire; the housewife was quietly rocking a squeaking cradle in which a pale child with the rickets, and drowsy with hunger, was jolting about. The brood of small children had taken refuge on top of the oven, which was barely warm, and were vivaciously narrating something to one another in a whisper. In the rotten straw beneath the sleeping-board, the goat and the suckling pig, which were great chums, were rustling about. It was necessary to bend down terribly, in order to avoid knocking one’s head on the ceiling. Then, too, you could not turn about without taking precautions: the distance between the threshold and the opposite wall was not more than five paces.

“Who’s there?” a low voice resounded from the darkness.

“I.”

“It can’t be Kuzma Ilitch, can it?”

“’Tis he himself.”

Syery moves aside, makes room on the bench. Kuzma sits down and lights his pipe. Oppressed by the darkness, Syery is simple, sad, confesses to his weaknesses. Now and then his voice quivers.

VII

The long, snowy winter set in.

The plain, gleaming palely white beneath a bluish lowering sky, appeared broader, more spacious, and even more deserted than ever. The cottages, sheds, bushes, grain-ricks stood out sharply against the new-fallen snow. Then the blizzards began and swept the country, burying it under so much snow that the village assumed a bleak northern aspect and began to show as its black points only the doors and tiny windows, which hardly peeped out from beneath white snow caps pulled well down, from amid the white masses of the earthen banks around the houses. Following the blizzards, across the concealed grey surface of the frozen crust on the fields swept cruel winds which tore away the last remaining light-brown foliage from the unsheltered oak scrub in the ravines. And then the one-farm owner, Taras Milyaeff, who resembled a native Siberian and was as keen on hunting as a real Siberian, set forth, plunging deep into the impenetrable snowdrifts, all dotted with the footprints of hares, and the water barrels were converted into frozen blocks, and slippery ice-coated hillocks formed around the water-holes; the roads wound among snowdrifts--and the ordinary winter conditions reigned. Epidemic diseases broke out in the villages: smallpox, typhus, scarlet fever, croup. But those maladies had existed uninterruptedly in the countryside since time immemorial, during the winter season, and people had become so used to them that they made no more mention of them than they did of changes in the weather. Around the holes cut in the ice, at which all Durnovka drank, over the fetid dark bottle-green water, the peasant women stood for days at a time, bent low, with their petticoats tucked up higher than their bare blue knees: they were in wet bast-slippers, and their heads were hugely muffled. Out of their iron kettles of ashes they dragged their own grey hempen chemises, patched to the waist with calico; their husbands’ heavy breeches; their children’s soiled swaddling-cloths--rinsed them out, beat them with clothes-mallets, and screamed at one another, imparting the information that their hands were “numbed from the steam,” that at Makaroff’s homestead his wife was dying of the typhus, that Yakoff’s daughter-in-law had got her throat stopped up. The little girls capered out of the cottages, straight from the stoves, with nothing on but their tiny chemises, and round the corner on the mounds of hardened snow. The little boys, dressed in their fathers’ old clothes, slid down the hills on their rude sleds, flew head over heels, screeched, were racked with terrible coughs, and returned home at evening in a state of fever, with heavy, bewildered heads. They were so chilled that they could barely move their lips as they begged for a drink, and, after drinking, they crept tearfully upon the oven. But even the mothers paid no attention to those who were ill. And darkness settled down at three o’clock, and the shaggy dogs sat on the roofs, almost on a level with the snowdrifts. Not a soul knew on what food those dogs existed. Nevertheless they were lively, even ferocious.

People woke early in the manor-house. At daybreak in the blue darkness, when the lights began to twinkle from the cottages, they made the fires in the stoves, and through the crevices under the eaves slowly poured the thick milky smoke. In the wing, with its frozen grey window, it became as cold as in the vestibule. Kuzma was awakened by the banging of doors and the rustling of frozen, snow-coated straw which Koshel was dragging from the truck-sledge. His low, hoarse voice became audible--the voice of a man who had risen earlier than any one else, working on an empty stomach, and chilled through. The pipe of the samovar began to rattle, and the Bride conversed with Koshel in a stern whisper. She did not sleep in the servants’ quarters, where the roaches bit arms and legs until they drew blood, but in the ante-room--and the whole village was convinced that there was a good reason for this. The village knew well what the Bride had undergone in the autumn: how she had been overwhelmed with disgrace--Rodka’s death--how her mother had gone away on a begging expedition, having locked up the empty cottage. Silent, crushed by the burden of her sorrow, the Bride was more severe and mournful than a cloistered nun. But what cared the village for other people’s woes? Kuzma had already heard, from Odnodvorka, what was being said in the village, and, as he woke, he always recalled it with shame and disgust. He pounded on the wall with his fist and, clearing his throat, began to smoke a cigarette: this quieted his heart and relieved his chest. He slept under his sheepskin coat, and, loath to part with the warmth, he continued to smoke, and said to himself: “A shameless people! Why, I have a daughter almost as old as she is....” The fact that a young woman slept on the other side of the partition wall excited only paternal tenderness in him. By day she was taciturn and serious, niggardly of words, shy with the modesty of a young maiden. And when she was asleep, there was even something childlike, sad, and lonely about her. One day she fell asleep after dinner on her chest in the ante-room, her head wrapped in a hempen shawl, her legs drawn up and one knee revealed. Her feet, in their bark shoes, lay in womanly wise, and the chilled knee gleamed white like that of a little girl. And Kuzma, as he passed her, turned away and called to her, so that she woke up and covered it. But would the village believe that? Even Tikhon Ilitch did not believe it: he laughed in a very peculiar way, at times. Indeed, he always had been distrustful, suspicious, coarse in his suspicions; and now he had completely lost his head. Say what you would to him, he had one answer for everything.

“Have you heard, Tikhon Ilitch? They say that Zakrzhevsky is dying of catarrh: they have taken him to Orel.”

“Stuff and nonsense. We know what that catarrh really is!”

“But the medical man told me.”

“Believe him if it suits you--”

“I want to subscribe to a newspaper,” you would say to him. “Please let me have ten rubles of my wages on account.”

“Hm! Why does a man want to stuff his head with lies? Well, and to tell the truth, I haven’t more than fifteen or twenty kopeks in my pocket--”

The Bride would enter the room, with downcast eyes: “We have hardly any flour on hand, Tikhon Ilitch--”

“How comes that? Hardly any? Oï, you’re talking nonsense, woman!” And he would contract his brows in a frown. And while he was proving that the flour ought to last for another three days, at least, he kept darting swift glances now at Kuzma, now at the Bride. Once he even inquired, with a grin: “And how do you sleep--all right? are you warm?”

And the Bride, who was embarrassed already by his visits, blushed deeply and, bowing her head, left the room, while Kuzma’s fingers turned cold with shame and wrath.

“Shame on you, brother Tikhon Ilitch,” he blurted out, turning away to the window. “And especially after what you told me yourself--”

“But then why did she blush?” inquired Tikhon Ilitch maliciously, with a perturbed and awkward smile.

VIII

The most unpleasant thing in the morning was--washing oneself. A frosty atmosphere was brought into the ante-room with the straw; ice that was like broken glass floated in the wash-basin. Kuzma sometimes began to drink his tea after having washed only his hands and, thus fresh from his slumbers, appeared truly an old man. Thanks to lack of cleanliness and the cold, he had grown extremely thin and grey since the autumn. His hands had grown thinner, and the skin on them had become more delicate, shiny, and covered with certain tiny purplish spots.

“The old grey horse has gone down a steep hill,” he said to himself.

It was a grey morning. Beneath the crusted grey snow the village also had become quite grey in hue by St. Philip’s Day. The frozen household linen hung like grey boards from the rafters under the roofs of the sheds. Everything round about the cottages was frozen--they poured out the slops and threw out the ashes. Tattered little urchins hurried through the streets between the cottages and sheds to school, ran up the snowdrifts and slid down them on their bark slippers; all of them had heavy crash bags containing slates and bread. From the opposite direction came aged, ailing dark-faced Tohugunok,[34] with not a trace of his former agility remaining, clad in his thin little overcoat, and bowed beneath the weight of his yoke, from which hung two buckets; stumbling along in his hideous felt boots, which had turned stiff as oaken boards, and were bound with pigskin. From drift to drift a horse dragged the water-cask, plugged with straw, rocking and splashing as it went; and behind it ran white-eyed Kobylyai--the stammerer. Women passed, on their way to borrow from one another salt, millet, a scoop of flour for griddlecakes, or a hasty pudding. The threshing-floors were deserted. Only at Yakoff’s place was smoke issuing from the gate of the kiln: in imitation of the rich peasants, he threshed during the winter. And beyond the threshing-floors, beyond the bare bushes in the back yards, beneath a low-hanging whitish sky, stretched the grey snow-covered plain, a waste of snow-crust frozen in the semblance of waves. It was in truth more cosy in the village, but the place seemed infected with the plague: almost every household had a case of smallpox or spotted typhus.

Occasionally Kuzma went to eat luncheon with Koshel in the servants’ quarters--potatoes as hot as fire itself, or the remains of the sour cabbage soup left over from the previous day. He recalled the town where he had lived all his life, and was amazed to find that he had no longing whatsoever to go back there. The town was Tikhon’s cherished dream; he scorned and hated the country with all his soul. Kuzma only tried to hate it. He now reviewed his existence with more terror than ever. He had grown thoroughly wild and unsociable in Durnovka; he did nothing, was bored, was distressed by his own idleness; frequently he omitted to wash himself; he did not take off his undercoat; he ate greedily out of one bowl with Koshel. But the worst of it all was that, while alarmed at his mode of existence, which was aging him not merely from day to day but actually from hour to hour, he was conscious that it was nevertheless agreeable to him; that he seemed to have got back into precisely that rut which, possibly, had rightly belonged to him from the day of his birth. Not for nothing, apparently, did the Durnovka blood flow in his veins! Nevertheless, that interminable Durnovka winter oppressed him to the point of pain--those cottages, the holes in the ice of the pond, the horrid little boys, the dogs on the roofs, the cold, the dirt, the sickness, the animal-like laziness of the peasant men. Nearly every day he called to mind Menshoff, Akim, Syery....

After luncheon he sometimes took a stroll over the manor-farm or in the village. He went also to Yakoff’s threshing-floor, or dropped in at the cottage of Syery or that of Koshel, whose old woman lived alone, was reputed to be a witch, was tall and frightfully emaciated, and had teeth as intrusively conspicuous as those of a skull. She spoke roughly and decisively, like a man, and smoked a pipe: she would make a fire in the stove, seat herself on the sleeping-board, and set to smoking, all by herself, swinging back and forth as she did so her long, thin leg in its heavy black bark shoe. During the entire Fast Kuzma went away from the farm only twice--once to the post-office, and once to see his brother. And those little trips were pleasant, but painful; Kuzma got so thoroughly chilled that he could not feel whether he had any feet or not. At the beginning of the autumn he had still possessed a firm glance, a tidy appearance. But the firmness of the glance had vanished, and his clothing had grown dilapidated. The collar of his shirt was reduced to a fringe, and the elbows of his coat wore through; his calfskin boots had become fairly red with rust, thin, and, in places, gaping. His sheepskin coat had served him so long that it was dotted all over with bald spots. And the wind on the plain was savage. After sitting in the house so long at Durnovka he was not able to endure the strong, fresh winter air. After prolonged inspection of the village the snowy grey expanse came as a surprise; the far distance, enveloped in blue tints of winter, seemed as a picture so beautiful that one could never gaze one’s fill. The horse dashed along smartly in the face of the harsh wind, snorting as he went; frozen lumps of snow flew from beneath his shod hoofs against the dashboard of the sledge. Koshel, with a blackish-purple frost-bitten cheek, briskly clearing his throat, sprang from the box at the slopes and leaped back into the sledge sidewise, on the run. But the wind pierced straight through him; his feet, tucked into straw that was all mixed with snow, ached and stiffened; his forehead and cheek-bones were racked with rheumatic pains. And it was so boresome in the low-ceiled post-office at Ulianovka--boresome as it can be only in official offices in the wilds. There was an odour of mildew, of sealing-wax. The ragged postman was pounding with his stamp. Grumpy Sakharoff, who resembled a gorilla, was roaring at the peasants, raging because it had not occurred to Kuzma to send him half a dozen fowls or, at least, a pud of flour; and he inquired: “What’s your name, and your family name?”--and, after rummaging in the closet, he announced with decision: “Nothing for you.” In the vicinity of Tikhon Ilitch’s house Kuzma was upset by the stench of manure fumes, which reminded him that in the world exist towns, people, newspapers, news. It was agreeable, also, to chat with his brother, to rest at his house and get warm.

But the chat never was a success. His brother was called off every minute to the shop, or about some detail of domestic management, and, besides, he could talk of nothing but his property matters, the lies, craftiness, and malice of the peasants--about the sheer necessity of getting rid of the estate as speedily as possible. Nastasya Petrovna was pitiable. Evidently she had come to fear her husband most terribly; she burst into the conversation at unseasonable moments, at equally unseasonable moments she praised him--his intelligence, his keen managerial eye, the fact that he entered into everything, every minute detail of the business, himself.

“And he’s so accessible to every one, so approachable!” she said--and Tikhon Ilitch roughly cut her short, while Kuzma did not know what to say, fearing to get mixed up in a quarrel. They had exchanged roles: now it was not he who suggested alarm, but his brother who frightened and exhorted him; it was not he but his brother who demonstrated that it was impossible to live in Russia. After an hour of that sort of conversation, Kuzma began to long to get home, to get back to the manor. “What is to become of me?” he thought in alarm, as he listened to his brother discussing the sale of the estate. And was it possible that that dreadful marriage between Deniska and the Bride would come off? And why did Tikhon so obstinately insist that the marriage must take place? “He has gone mad, he certainly has gone mad!” muttered Kuzma on his way home, as he called to mind Tikhon’s surly and malevolent face, his uncommunicativeness, his suspiciousness, and his wearisome repetition of one and the same thing over and over. He began to shout at Koshel, at the horse, feeling in a hurry to hide in his little house his sadness, his old, cold clothing, his loneliness, and his tenderness at the thought of the Bride’s sweet, sorrowful face, her womanliness and--her taciturnity. “Ekh, and how could she fail to go to ruin here!” he said sadly to himself, as he gazed through the twilight gloom at the meagre lights in Durnovka.

IX

During the Christmas holidays Ivanushka, from Basovka, dropped in to see Kuzma. He was an old-fashioned peasant who had grown foolish from old age, although once on a time he had been renowned for his bear-like strength. Thickset, bent into a bow, he never lifted his shaggy dark brown head. He always walked with his toes turned inward. And he amazed Kuzma even more than had Menshoff, Akim, and Syery. In the cholera year of ’ninety-two, the whole of Ivanushka’s huge family had died. All he had left was a son, a soldier, who was now working for the railway as a line-guard, about five versts from Durnovka. Ivanushka might have passed his declining days with his son, but he preferred to roam about and ask alms. He strode lightly, in his bandy-legged way, across the farmyard, with his cap and his staff in his left hand, a bag in his right, and his head, on which the snow shone white, uncovered--and for some reason or other the sheep dogs did not growl at him. He entered the house, mumbled “May God bless this house and the master of this house,” and seated himself on the floor against the wall. Kuzma dropped his book and in amazement stared timidly at him over his eyeglasses, as if he had been some wild beast from the steppe, whose presence inside a house was a prodigy.

Silently, with downcast lashes and a slight amiable smile, the Bride made her appearance, walking lightly in her bark-slippers, gave Ivanushka a bowl of boiled potatoes and the entire corner crust of a loaf, all grey with salt, and remained standing at the door-jamb. She wore bark-slippers; she was broad and robust in the shoulders; and her handsome, faded face was so simple and old-fashioned, in the peasant style, that it seemed as if she could not possibly address Ivanushka otherwise than as “grandfather.” And, smiling for him and him alone, she did indeed say softly: “Eat, eat, grandfather.”

And he, without raising his head, and recognizing her kindliness from her voice alone, quietly wailed in reply, at times mumbling: “The Lord save ye, granddaughter!” then crossed himself broadly and awkwardly, as if his hand had been a paw, and eagerly fell to on the food. The snow melted on his dark brown hair, supernaturally thick and coarse. The water streamed down from his bark-shoes on to the floor. From his ancient dark brown fitted coat, worn over a dirty hemp-crash shirt, emanated the smoky odour of a chimneyless hovel. His hands were deformed by long toil, and his horny unbending fingers fished up the potatoes with difficulty.

“You must feel cold in that thin coat, don’t you?” inquired Kuzma, in a loud tone.

“Hey?” answered Ivanushka in a faint wail, holding his hand to his ear, which was all overgrown with hair.

“You are cold, aren’t you?”

Ivanushka thought it over. “Why cold?” he replied, pausing between his words. “Not a bit cold. ’Twas a lot colder in days gone by.”

“Lift up your head; put your hair in order!”

Ivanushka slowly shook his head.

“I can’t raise it now, brother. It drags earthward.” And with a dim smile he made an effort to lift his dreadful face, all overgrown with hair, and his tiny screwed-up eyes.

When he had finished eating he heaved a sigh, made the sign of the cross, collected the crumbs from his knees and chewed them up; then he felt about at his sides, in search of his bag, stick, and cap, and, having found them, and recovered his equanimity, he began a leisurely conversation. He was capable of sitting silent for the whole day, but Kuzma and the Bride plied him with questions, and he answered, as if asleep and from a far distance. He narrated in his clumsy, ancient language that the Tsar was made entirely of gold; that the Tsar could not eat fish--’twas exceeding salt--that once on a time the Prophet Elijah broke through the sky and tumbled down on the earth--“he was exceedingly heavy”--that John the Baptist was as shaggy as a ram when he was born, and that at his baptism he beat his godfather over the head with his iron crutch, in order that the man might “come to his senses”; that every horse, once a year, on St. Flor and St. Lavr’s Day, seeks an opportunity to kill a man. He told how in days of yore the rye had grown up so densely that it was impossible for a snake to crawl through it; how in those times they reaped at the rate of two desyatini a day for each man; how he himself had owned a gelding which was kept “on a chain,” so powerful and terrible was it; how one day sixty years agone he, Ivanushka, had had a shaft arch stolen from him for which he would not have accepted two rubles. He was firmly convinced that his family had died, not of cholera, but because after a fire they had gone to a new cottage and had passed the night in it without having first let a cock pass the night there, and that he and his son had been saved solely by accident: he had slept on the grain-rick.

Toward evening Ivanushka rose and walked away, without paying the slightest heed to what the weather was like and without yielding to all their admonitions to remain until the morrow. And he caught his death cold, and on Epiphany Day he died in his son’s guard-box. His son urged him to receive the Sacrament. Ivanushka would not consent; he said that once you received the Communion you would surely die, whereas he was firmly determined not to “yield to death.” For whole days at a time he lay unconscious; but even in his delirium he begged his daughter-in-law to say that he was not at home if Death should knock at the door. Once, at night, he came to himself, collected his forces, crept down from the top of the oven, and knelt down in front of the holy picture, illuminated by a shrine-lamp. He sighed heavily, mumbled for a long time, kept repeating: “O Lord--Dear Little Father--forgive my sins.” Then he became thoughtful and remained silent for a long time, with his head bowed on the floor. Then, all of a sudden, he rose to his feet and said firmly: “No. I will not yield!” But the next morning he noticed that his daughter-in-law was rolling out the dough for patties and heating the oven hot.

“Are you preparing for my funeral?” he asked, in a quavering voice.

His daughter-in-law made no reply. Again he collected his forces, again crawled down from the oven, and went out into the vestibule. Yes, it was true: there, upright against the wall, stood a huge purple coffin, adorned with white eight-pointed crosses. Then he remembered what had happened thirty years before, to his neighbour old Lukyan: Lukyan had fallen ill, and they had bought a coffin for him--it, too, was a fine, expensive coffin--and brought from the town flour, vodka, salted striped bass; but Lukyan went and got well. What was to be done with the coffin? How were they to justify the outlay? They cursed Lukyan about it for the space of five years thereafter, made life unendurable with their reproaches, tortured him with hunger, drove him frantic with lice and dirt. Ivanushka, recalling this, bowed his head and submissively went back into the cottage. And that night, as he lay on his back, unconscious, he began, in a trembling, plaintive voice, to sing, ever more and more softly. And suddenly he shook his knees, hiccoughed, raised his chest high with a sigh, and, with foam on his parted lips, grew cold in death....

X

Kuzma lay in his bed for almost a month, because of Ivanushka. On Epiphany morning people declared that a bird would freeze stiff as it flew, and Kuzma did not even possess felt boots. Nevertheless, he went to take a last look at the dead man. His hands, folded and rigid below his vast chest on a clean hempen shirt, deformed by calloused growths in the course of full eighty years of rudimentarily heavy toil, were so coarse and dreadful that Kuzma hastily turned his eyes away. And he was unable to cast even so much as a sidelong glance at Ivanushka’s hair and his dead wild-beast face. He drew the white calico up over him as speedily as possible. And from beneath the calico there suddenly was wafted a suffocatingly repulsive sweetish odour....

With a view to warming himself up, Kuzma drank some vodka and seated himself in front of the hotly flaming oven. It was warm there in the guardsman’s box, and neat as for a festival. Over the head of the spacious purple coffin, covered with calico, twinkled the golden flame of a small wax candle affixed to the dark holy picture in the corner; and a cheap wood-cut, manufactured by the Josif Brothers, glared forth in vivid colours. The soldier’s courteous wife easily lifted on her oven-fork and thrust into the oven kettles weighing at least a pud, chatted cheerfully about government, supplied fuel, and kept entreating him to remain until her husband should return from the village. But Kuzma was shaking with fever; his face burned from the vodka, which, coursing like poison through his chilled body, began to induce causeless tears to well up in his eyes. And without having got warm, he drove away across the white, strong billows of the plain, to Tikhon Ilitch. Covered with hoar-frost, the whitish-curly gelding trotted swiftly along, emitting roaring and quacking sounds, like a drake, ejecting from his nostrils columns of grey vapour. The sledge squeaked; its iron runners screeched sonorously over the hard snow. Behind Kuzma, in frozen circles, the low-hanging sun shone yellow; in front, from the North, came a wind which scorched one and cut short one’s breath. The branches which marked out the road bent under a thick, curly coating of rime; the big grey gold-hammers flew in flocks ahead of the horse, scattered over the glistening road, pecked at the frozen manure, again took flight, and again dispersed. Kuzma gazed at them through his heavy white eyelashes, feeling that his face had turned to wood, and that, with his beard and mustache like white curls, he had come to resemble a Christmastide mask. The sun was setting; the snowy billows gleamed with a death-like green in the orange glow, and blue shadows extended from their crests and crenellations. Kuzma turned his horse sharply about and drove it back, in the direction of home. The sun had set; a faint light glimmered in the house with its grey, neglected panes; the blue twilight hung over it, and it looked cold and unsociable. The bullfinch which had hung in a cage near the window, overlooking the orchard, had died--in all probability from the coarse, strong tobacco--and lay with its legs sticking up, its feathers ruffled, and its crimson beak agape.

“Done for!” said Kuzma, and picked up the bullfinch to throw out.

Durnovka, overwhelmed with frozen snow, was so far from all the world on that mournful evening, in the heart of the steppe winter, that he suddenly felt frightened by it. All was over! His burning head was confused and heavy. He would take to his bed at once, and never rise from it again.

The Bride, her bark-shoes screeching on the snow as she walked, approached the porch, carrying a pail in her hand.

“I am ill, Duniushka!” said Kuzma caressingly, in the hope of hearing from her lips a caressing word.

But the Bride replied indifferently, drily: “Shall I bring in the samovar?” And she did not even inquire what was the matter with him. Neither did she ask anything about Ivanushka.

Kuzma returned to the dark house and, shivering all over and wondering with alarm where he could now go when need compelled, lay down on the divan. And the evenings slipped into nights and the nights slipped into days, and he lost all count of them.

About three o’clock on the first night he woke up and pounded on the wall with his fist, in order to ask for a drink: he had been tormented in his sleep by thirst and the thought, had they thrown out the bullfinch? No one answered his knocking: the Bride had gone off to the servants’ quarters to pass the night. And Kuzma, conscious now, remembered that he was sick unto death, and he was overpowered by such melancholy as would have seized him in a tomb. Obviously the vestibule, which smelled of snow and straw and horse-collars, was empty! Obviously he, sick and helpless, was utterly alone in that dark, ice-cold little house, where the windows gleamed dim and grey amid the winter night, with that useless cage hanging beside them!

“O Lord, save and have mercy; O Lord, help in some way,” he murmured, pulling himself up and fumbling with trembling hands through his pockets.

He wanted to strike a match. But his whisper was feverish; something rustled and reverberated in his burning head; his hands and feet were icy cold. Klasha came, quickly threw open the door, placed his head on the pillow, and sat down on a chair by the side of the couch. She was dressed like a young lady, in a velvet cloak and a little cap and muff of white fur; her hands were scented with perfume, her eyes shone, her cheeks had turned crimson with the frost. “Ah, how well everything has come out!” some one whispered. But what was not nice was that Klasha, for some reason, had not lighted the lamp; that she had come, not to see him, but to go to Ivanushka’s funeral; that she suddenly began to sing, accompanying herself on a guitar: “Haz-Bulat, the dauntless, thy mountain hut is poor.”... Then, all at once, the whole thing vanished; he opened his eyes--and not a trace remained of that mysterious, agitating, and alarming affair which had filled his head with nonsense. Again he beheld the dark, cold room, the grey gleaming windows; he comprehended that everything around him was plain and simple, too simple--that he was ill and quite, quite alone....

In the deadly melancholy which poisoned his soul at the beginning of his illness, Kuzma had raved about the bullfinch, Klasha, Voronezh. But even in his delirium the thought had never left him that he must tell some one that they must show pity on him in one respect--they must not bury him in Kolodezy. But, my God! was it not madness to hope for pity in Durnovka? Once he came to himself in the morning, when the fire was being made in the stove--and the simple, quiet voices of Koshel and the Bride seemed to him pitiless, alien, and strange, as the life of well people always appears pitiless, alien, strange to a sick person. He tried to call out, to ask for the samovar--but remained dumb and almost fell to weeping. The angry whisper of Koshel became audible--discussing him, the sick man, of course--and the Bride’s abrupt reply: “Well, all’s up with him! He’ll die--and be buried....”

Then his melancholy began to abate. The sun, declining to the west, shone through the windows, athwart the bare branches of the acacias. The tobacco smoke hung in a blue cloud. Beside the bed sat the aged medical man, redolent of drugs and frosty freshness, pulling icicles from his mustache. On the table the samovar was bubbling, and Tikhon Ilitch, tall, grey, severe, was brewing aromatic tea as he stood by it. The medical man drank eight or ten glasses, talked about his cows, the price of flour and butter; Tikhon Ilitch described how wonderful, how expensive, Nastasya Petrovna’s funeral had been, and how glad he was that at last he had found a purchaser for Durnovka. Kuzma understood that Tikhon Ilitch had just come from the town, that Nastasya Petrovna had died there suddenly, on her way to a railway station; he understood that the funeral had cost Tikhon Ilitch frightfully dear, and that he had already taken earnest-money for Durnovka--and he was completely indifferent.

XI

One day he awakened very late and, feeling neither weakness nor trembling in his legs, sat up to drink his tea. The day was overcast, warm, and much snow had fallen. Syery passed the window, making on the new snow imprints of his bark-shoes, sprinkled with tiny crosses. The sheep dogs were running beside him, sniffing at his tattered coattails. And he was leading by the bridle a tall horse of a dirty light bay colour, hideously old and skinny, its shoulders abraded by the collar; it had an in-curving back and a thin, unclean tail. The horse was limping on three legs and dragging the fourth, which was broken below the knee. Then Kuzma recalled that two days previously Tikhon Ilitch had been there, and had said that he had ordered Syery to give the dogs a treat--to find and kill an old horse; that Syery had in former days been engaged in that occupation at times--the purchase of dead or worthless cattle for their hides. A terrible thing had recently happened to Syery, Tikhon Ilitch had said: in making ready to kill a mare, Syery had forgotten to hobble her--he had merely bound her and turned her muzzle to one side--and the mare, as soon as, crossing himself, he had plunged the thin small knife into her jugular vein, had uttered a scream and, screaming, had hurled herself upon her assassin, her yellow teeth laid bare in pain and rage, streams of black blood spurting out upon the snow, and had pursued him for a long time, exactly as if she had been a man--and would have caught him but that, “luckily, the snow was deep.”

Kuzma had been so deeply impressed by this incident that now, as he glanced through the window, he felt the heaviness returning in his legs. He began to gulp down the boiling hot tea, and gradually recovered himself. He lighted his cigarette and sat for a while smoking. At last he rose, went into the ante-room, and looked out at the bare, sparse orchard through the window, which had thawed. In the orchard, on the snow-white pall of the meadow, a high-ribbed, bloody carcass with a long neck and a crushed head stood out redly. The dogs, their backs all hunched up and their paws braced on the meat, were greedily tearing out and dragging away the entrails. Two aged blackish-grey crows were hopping sidewise toward the head, and had started to fly thither, when the dogs, snarling, darted upon them; and once more they alighted on the virginally pure snow. “Ivanushka, Syery, the crows--” Kuzma said to himself. “Perhaps those crows can recall the times of Ivan the Terrible. O Lord, save and show mercy--take me away from here!”

Kuzma’s indisposition did not leave him for another fortnight. The thought of spring affected him both mournfully and joyfully; he longed to get away from Durnovka as speedily as possible. He knew that the end of winter was not yet in sight; but the thaw had already set in. The first week of February was dark and foggy. The fog covered the plain and devoured the snow. The village turned black; water stood between the dirty snowdrifts; the village policeman drove through the village one day, his horses hitched tandem, all spattered with horse droppings. The cocks took to crowing; through the ventilators penetrated a disturbing spring-like dampness. He wanted to go on living; to go on living and wait for the spring, his removal to the town; to live on, submitting to fate, and to do any sort of work whatsoever, if only to earn a single bit of bread. And to work, of course, for his brother--regardless of what he was like. Why, his brother had proposed to him while he was ill that they should move over to Vorgol. “Why should I turn you out of doors?” he had said after pondering the matter.--“I’m giving up the shop and the homestead on the first of March: let’s go to the town, brother, as far as possible from these cutthroats.”

And it was true: cutthroats they were. Odnodvorka had come in and imparted the particulars of a recent encounter with Syery. Deniska had returned from Tula, and had been knocking about without work, gabbling about the village that he wanted to marry; that he had no money, but would soon earn some of first-class quality. At first the village had pronounced these tales absurd nonsense; then, following Deniska’s hints, it had come to understand the drift of the matter and had believed him. Syery, too, had believed him, and began to curry favour with his son. But after slaying the horse and receiving a ruble from Tikhon Ilitch and securing half a ruble for the skin, he had begun to chatter incautiously and had gone on a spree. He drank for two days, and lost his pipe, and lay down on the oven to recover. His head ached, and he had nothing in which to put tobacco for a smoke. So, to make cigarettes, he began to peel the ceiling, which Deniska had pasted over with newspapers and divers pictures. He did his peeling on the sly, of course; but nevertheless, one day, Deniska caught him at it. He caught him and began to roar at him. Syery, being intoxicated, began to roar in return. Thereupon, Deniska pulled him off the oven and thrashed him within an inch of his life, until the neighbors rushed in. Peace was concluded on the evening of the following day, it is true, over cracknels and vodka; but, as Kuzma said to himself, was not Tikhon Ilitch a cut-throat also when he insisted, with the obstinacy of a crazy man, on the marriage of the Bride to one of these cutthroats?

When Kuzma first heard about that marriage, he firmly made up his mind that he would not permit it. What a horror, what folly! But later on, when he recovered consciousness during his illness, he actually rejoiced over this foolish idea. He had been surprised and impressed by the indifference which the Bride had displayed toward him, a sick man. “A beast, a savage!” he had said to himself; and, calling to mind the wedding, he had added spitefully: “And that’s capital! That’s exactly what she deserves!” Now, after his illness, both his decision and his wrath disappeared. He managed to get into conversation with the Bride about Tikhon Ilitch’s intentions; and she replied calmly:

“Well, yes, I did have some talk about that affair with Tikhon Ilitch. God grant him good health for such a fine idea!”

“A fine idea?” said Kuzma in amazement.

The Bride looked at him and shook her head. “Well, and why isn’t it fine? Great heavens, but you are queer, Kuzma Ilitch! He offers money, and takes the expense of the wedding on himself. Then again, he has not picked out some widower or other, but a young, unmarried man, without vices--neither rotten nor a drunkard--”

“But he’s a sluggard, a bully, a downright fool,” added Kuzma.

The Bride dropped her eyes and made no reply. Heaving a sigh, she turned and went toward the door.

“As you like,” she said, her voice trembling. “’Tis your affair. Break it off--God help you--”

Kuzma opened his eyes very wide and shouted: “Stop! have you lost your senses? Do you think I wish you ill?”

The Bride turned round and halted. “And isn’t it wishing me ill?” she said hotly and roughly, her cheeks flushing and her eyes blazing. “What is to become of me, according to your idea? Am I to go on for ever as an outcast, at the thresholds of other people’s houses? Eating the crusts of strangers? Wandering about, a homeless beggar? Or am I to hunt up some old widower? Haven’t I swallowed tears enough already?”

And her voice broke. She fell to weeping and left the room. In the evening Kuzma tried to convince her that he had no intention of breaking up the affair, and at last she believed him and smiled a friendly, reserved smile.

“Well, thank you,” she said in the pleasant tone which she used to Ivanushka.

But at this point the tears began to quiver on her eyelashes, and once more Kuzma gave up in despair. “What’s the matter now?” said he.

And the Bride answered softly: “Well, perhaps Deniska is not much of a joy--”

Koshel brought from the post-office a newspaper nearly six weeks old. The days were dark and foggy, and Kuzma read from morning till night, seated at the window.

And when he had finished and had made himself dizzy with the number of fresh executions, he was benumbed. Heretofore he had been suffocated with rage when he read the newspapers--futile rage, because human receptivity was unequal to taking in what one read there. Now his fingers grew cold--nothing more. Yes, yes, there was nothing to get excited about. Everything went as if according to programme. Everything fitted together perfectly. He raised his head: the sleet was driving in white slanting lines, falling upon the black, miserable little village, on the muddy roads with their hillocks and hollows, on the horse-dung, the ice, and the pools of water. A twilight mist concealed the boundless plain--all that vast empty space with its snows, forests, settlements, towns--the kingdom of cold and of death.

“Avdotya!” shouted Kuzma, as he rose to his feet. “Tell Koshel to harness the horse to the sledge. I’m going to my brother’s....”

XII

Tikhon Ilitch was at home. In a Russian shirt of cotton print, huge and powerful, swarthy of countenance, with white beard and grey frowning brows, he was sitting with the samovar and brewing himself some tea.

“Ah! how are you, brother?” he exclaimed in welcome, but with his brows still contracted. “So you have crawled out through God’s snow? Look out: isn’t it rather early?”

“I was so deadly bored, brother,” replied Kuzma, as they kissed each other.

“Well, if you were bored, come and warm yourself and we’ll have a chat....”

After questioning each other as to whether there were any news, they began in silence to drink tea, after which they started to smoke.

“You are growing very thin, dear brother!” remarked Tikhon Ilitch as he inhaled his smoke and scrutinized Kuzma with a sidelong glance.

“One does get thin,” replied Kuzma quietly. “Don’t you read the newspapers?”

Tikhon Ilitch smiled. “That nonsense? No, God preserve me.”

“If you only knew how many executions there are!”

“Executions? That’s all right. Haven’t you heard what happened near Eletz? At the farm of the Bykoff brothers? Probably you remember--those fellows who can’t pronounce their letters right? Well, those Bykoffs were sitting, just as you and I are sitting together now, playing checkers one evening. Suddenly--what was it? There was a stamping on the porch and a shout of ‘Open the door!’ Well, brother, and before those Bykoffs had time to blink an eye, in rolls their labourer, a peasant after the pattern of Syery, and behind him two scalawags of some breed or other--hooligan adventurers, in a word. And all of them armed with crowbars. They brandished their crowbars and began to yell: ‘Put up your hands, curse your mother’s memory!’ Of course, the Bykoffs were thoroughly scared--scared to death--and they leaped to their feet and shouted: ‘What’s the meaning of this?’ And their nice little peasant yells, ‘Put ’em oop, put ’em oop!’” Here Tikhon Ilitch smiled, became thoughtful, and stopped talking.

“Well, tell the rest of it,” said Kuzma.

“There’s nothing more to tell. They stuck up their hands, as a matter of course, and asked: ‘What do you want?’ ‘Give us some ham! Where are your keys?’ ‘Damn you! As if you didn’t know! There they are yonder, on the door lintel, hanging on the nail.’”

“And they said that with their hands raised?” interrupted Kuzma.

“Of course they had their hands raised. And those men are going to pay heavily for those upraised hands! They’ll be hanged, naturally. They are already in jail, the dear creatures--”

“Are they going to hang them on account of the ham?”

“No! for the fun of it, Lord forgive me for my sin,” retorted Tikhon Ilitch, half angrily, half in jest. “For the love of God, do stop talking balderdash and trying to pretend you’re a Balashkin! ’Tis time to drop that.”

Kuzma pulled at his grey beard. His haggard, emaciated face, his mournful eyes, his left brow, which slanted upward, all were reflected in the mirror, and as he looked at himself he silently assented.

“Talking balderdash? Truly it is time--I ought to have dropped that long ago....”

Then Tikhon Ilitch turned the conversation to business. Evidently he had been thinking things over a little while previously, during the story, merely because something far more important than executions had occurred to him--a bit of business.

“Here now, I’ve already told Deniska that he is to finish off that music as soon as possible,” he began firmly, clearly, and sternly, sifting tea into the teapot from his fist. “And I beg you, brother, to take a hand in it also--in that music. It is awkward for me, you understand. And after it is over, you can move over here. ’Twill be comfortable, brother! Once we have made up our mind to change our entire investment, down to the last scrap, there’s no sense in your stopping on there with nothing to do. It only doubles the expense. And once we have removed elsewhere, why, get into harness alongside me. Once we have shifted the burden from our shoulders, we’ll go off to the town, God willing, to amass grain, and we’ll get into real business. And then we’ll never come back to this hole of a place again. We’ll shake the dust of it from our feet, and it may go to hell for all I care. I don’t propose to rot in it! Bear in mind,” he said, contracting his brows in a frown, stretching out his arms, and clenching his fists, “you can’t wrest things out of my grasp yet a while. ’Tis too early for me to take to lying on top of the oven! I’m still capable of ripping the horns off the devil himself!”

Kuzma listened, staring almost in terror at his fixed, fairly crazed eyes, at his mouth set awry, at his words distinctly uttered in a rapacious sort of way--listened and held his peace. Later on he inquired: “Brother, tell me, for Christ’s sake, what profit to you is there in this marriage? I don’t understand; God is my witness, I don’t understand it. I can’t bear even the sight of that Deniska of yours. That’s a new type--new Russia will be worse than all the old types. Don’t you make any mistake, thinking he is bashful and sentimental and only pretends to be a fool: he’s an extremely cynical beast. People are saying of me that I am living with the Bride--”

“Well, you don’t know moderation in anything,” interrupted Tikhon Ilitch with a frown. “You’re for ever hammering away at the same thing: ‘an unhappy nation, an unhappy nation!’ And now--you call them brutes!”

“Yes, I do hammer at that idea, and I shall go on hammering at it!” Kuzma broke in hotly. “But I’ve lost my wits completely! Nowadays I don’t understand at all: whether it is an unhappy nation, or-- Come now, listen to me. You know you hate that man yourself, that Deniska! You both hate each other! He never speaks of you except to call you a ‘bloodsucker who has gnawed himself into the very vitals of the people,’ and here you are calling _him_ a bloodsucker! He is boasting insolently about the village that now he is the equal of the king!”

“Well, I know that,” Tikhon Ilitch again interrupted.

“But do you know what he is saying about the Bride?” went on Kuzma, not listening to him. “She’s handsome--she has, you know, such a white, delicate complexion--but he, the stupid animal--do you know what he is saying about her? ‘She’s all enameled, the trollop!’ And, by this time, you must understand one thing: he certainly will not live in the village. You couldn’t keep that vagabond in the country now with a lasso. What sort of a farmer and what sort of a family man do you suppose he’ll be? Yesterday, I heard, he was roaming about the village and singing in a lewd voice: ‘She’s beautiful as an angel from heaven, as sly as a damon from hell.’”

“I know it!” yelled Tikhon Ilitch. “He won’t live in the country--not for any consideration on earth, he won’t! Well, and devil take him! And as for his being no sort of a farmer, you and I are nice farmers ourselves, ain’t we? I remember how I was talking to you about business--in the eating-house, do you remember?--and all the while you were listening to that quail. Well, go on; what comes next?”

“What do you mean? What has the quail to do with it?” inquired Kuzma.

Tikhon Ilitch began to drum on the table with his fingers and said sternly, uttering each word with great distinctness: “Bear in mind: if you grind water, you’ll be left with just water as the result. My word is sacred to ages of ages. Once I have said I’ll do a thing--I’ll do it. I won’t set a candle before the holy picture in atonement for my sin, but I’ll do a good deed instead. Although I may give only a mite, the Lord will remember me for that mite.”

Kuzma sprang from his seat. “The Lord, the Lord!” he cried, in a falsetto tone. “What has the Lord to do with that affair of yours? What can the Lord mean to Deniska, to Akimka, to Menshoff, to Syery, to you, or to me?”

“Eh?” inquired Tikhon Ilitch severely. “What Akimka is that you’re talking about?”

“When I lay there dying,” pursued Kuzma, paying no heed to him, “did I think very much about Him? I thought just one thing: ‘I don’t know anything about Him, and I don’t know how to think’!” shouted Kuzma. “I’m an ignorant man!”

And glancing about him with roving, suffering eyes, as he buttoned and unbuttoned his coat, he strode across the room and halted directly in front of Tikhon Ilitch.