handwriting in which the other part of the manuscript was written, the editor considers that he is justified in concluding that the above lines were added subsequently by another person, especially since it has come to his (the editor’s) knowledge that Mr. Tchulkaturin actually did die on the night between the 1st and 2nd of April in the year 18–, at his native place, Sheep’s Springs.
* * * * *
A TOUR IN THE FOREST
FIRST DAY
The sight of the vast pinewood, embracing the whole horizon, the sight of the ‘Forest,’ recalls the sight of the ocean. And the sensations it arouses are the same; the same primaeval untouched force lies outstretched in its breadth and majesty before the eyes of the spectator. From the heart of the eternal forest, from the undying bosom of the waters, comes the same voice: ‘I have nothing to do with thee,’–nature says to man, ‘I reign supreme, while do thou bestir thyself to thy utmost to escape dying.’ But the forest is gloomier and more monotonous than the sea, especially the pine forest, which is always alike and almost soundless. The ocean menaces and caresses, it frolics with every colour, speaks with every voice; it reflects the sky, from which too comes the breath of eternity, but an eternity as it were not so remote from us…. The dark, unchanging pine-forest keeps sullen silence or is filled with a dull roar–and at the sight of it sinks into man’s heart more deeply, more irresistibly, the sense of his own nothingness. It is hard for man, the creature of a day, born yesterday, and doomed to death on the morrow, it is hard for him to bear the cold gaze of the eternal Isis, fixed without sympathy upon him: not only the daring hopes and dreams of youth are humbled and quenched within him, enfolded by the icy breath of the elements; no–his whole soul sinks down and swoons within him; he feels that the last of his kind may vanish off the face of the earth–and not one needle will quiver on those twigs; he feels his isolation, his feebleness, his fortuitousness;–and in hurried, secret panic, he turns to the petty cares and labours of life; he is more at ease in that world he has himself created; there he is at home, there he dares yet believe in his own importance and in his own power.
Such were the ideas that came into my mind, some years ago, when, standing on the steps of a little inn on the bank of the marshy little river Ressetta, I first gazed upon the forest. The bluish masses of fir-forest lay in long, continuous ridges before me; here and there was the green patch of a small birch-copse; the whole sky-line was hugged by the pine-wood; nowhere was there the white gleam of a church, nor bright stretches of meadow–it was all trees and trees, everywhere the ragged edge of the tree-tops, and a delicate dim mist, the eternal mist of the forest, hung over them in the distance. It was not indolent repose this immobility of life suggested; no–the absence of life, something dead, even in its grandeur, was what came to me from every side of the horizon. I remember big white clouds were swimming by, slowly and very high up, and the hot summer day lay motionless upon the silent earth. The reddish water of the stream glided without a splash among the thick reeds: at its bottom could be dimly discerned round cushions of pointed moss, and its banks sank away in the swampy mud, and sharply reappeared again in white hillocks of fine crumbling sand. Close by the little inn ran the trodden highroad.
On this road, just opposite the steps, stood a cart, loaded with boxes and hampers. Its owner, a thin pedlar with a hawk nose and mouse-like eyes, bent and lame, was putting in it his little nag, lame like himself. He was a gingerbread-seller, who was making his way to the fair at Karatchev. Suddenly several people appeared on the road, others straggled after them … at last, quite a crowd came trudging into sight; all of them had sticks in their hands and satchels on their shoulders. From their fatigued yet swinging gait, and from their sun-burnt faces, one could see they had come from a long distance. They were leatherworkers and diggers coming back from working for hire.
An old man of seventy, white all over, seemed to be their leader. From time to time he turned round and with a quiet voice urged on those who lagged behind. ‘Now, now, now, lads,’ he said, ‘no–ow.’ They all walked in silence, in a sort of solemn hush. Only one of them, a little man with a wrathful air, in a sheepskin coat wide open, and a lambswool cap pulled right over his eyes, on coming up to the gingerbread man, suddenly inquired: ‘How much is the gingerbread, you tomfool?’
‘What sort of gingerbread will it be, worthy sir?’ the disconcerted gingerbread–man responded in a thin, little voice. ‘Some are a farthing–and others cost a halfpenny. Have you a halfpenny in your purse?’
‘But I guess it will sweeten the belly too much,’ retorted the sheepskin, and he retreated from the cart.
‘Hurry up, lads, hurry up,’ I heard the old man’s voice: ‘it’s far yet to our night’s rest.’
‘An uneducated folk,’ said the gingerbread-man, with a squint at me, directly all the crowd had trudged past: ‘is such a dainty for the likes of them?’
And quickly harnessing his horse, he went down to the river, where a little wooden ferry could be seen. A peasant in a white felt ‘schlik’ (the usual headgear in the forest) came out of a low mud hut to meet him, and ferried him over to the opposite bank. The little cart, with one wheel creaking from time to time, crawled along the trodden and deeply rutted road.
I fed my horses, and I too was ferried over. After struggling for a couple of miles through the boggy prairie, I got at last on to a narrow raised wooden causeway to a clearing in the forest. The cart jolted unevenly over the round beams of the causeway: I got out and went along on foot. The horses moved in step snorting and shaking their heads from the gnats and flies. The forest took us into its bosom. On the outskirts, nearer to the prairie, grew birches, aspens, limes, maples, and oaks. Then they met us more rarely, the dense firwood moved down on us in an unbroken wall. Further on were the red, bare trunks of pines, and then again a stretch of mixed copse, overgrown with underwood of hazelnut, mountain ash, and bramble, and stout, vigorous weeds. The sun’s rays threw a brilliant light on the tree-tops, and, filtering through the branches, here and there reached the ground in pale streaks and patches. Birds I scarcely heard–they do not like great forests. Only from time to time there came the doleful, thrice-repeated call of a hoopoe, and the angry screech of a nuthatch or a jay; a silent, always solitary bird kept fluttering across the clearing, with a flash of golden azure from its lovely feathers. At times the trees grew further apart, ahead of us the light broke in, the cart came out on a cleared, sandy, open space. Thin rye was growing over it in rows, noiselessly nodding its pale ears. On one side there was a dark, dilapidated little chapel, with a slanting cross over a well. An unseen brook was babbling peaceably with changing, ringing sounds, as though it were flowing into an empty bottle. And then suddenly the road was cut in half by a birch-tree recently fallen, and the forest stood around, so old, lofty, and slumbering, that the air seemed pent in. In places the clearing lay under water. On both sides stretched a forest bog, all green and dark, all covered with reeds and tiny alders. Ducks flew up in pairs–and it was strange to see those water-birds darting rapidly about among the pines. ‘Ga, ga, ga, ga,’ their drawn-out call kept rising unexpectedly. Then a shepherd drove a flock through the underwood: a brown cow with short, pointed horns broke noisily through the bushes and stood stockstill at the edge of the clearing, her big, dark eyes fixed on the dog running before me. A slight breeze brought the delicate, pungent smell of burnt wood. A white smoke in the distance crept in eddying rings over the pale, blue forest air, showing that a peasant was charcoal-burning for a glass-factory or for a foundry. The further we went on, the darker and stiller it became all round us. In the pine-forest it is always still; there is only, high overhead, a sort of prolonged murmur and subdued roar in the tree-tops. One goes on and on, and this eternal murmur of the forest never ceases, and the heart gradually begins to sink, and a man longs to come out quickly into the open, into the daylight; he longs to draw a full breath again, and is oppressed by the fragrant damp and decay….
For about twelve miles we drove on at a walking pace, rarely at a trot. I wanted to get by daylight to Svyatoe, a hamlet lying in the very heart of the forest. Twice we met peasants with stripped bark or long logs on carts.
‘Is it far to Svyatoe?’ I asked one of them.
‘No, not far.’
‘How far?’
‘It’ll be a little over two miles.’
Another hour and a half went by. We were still driving on and on. Again we heard the creak of a laden cart. A peasant was walking beside it.
‘How far, brother, is it still to Svyatoe?’
‘What?’
‘How far to Svyatoe?’
‘Six miles.’
The sun was already setting when at last I got out of the forest and saw facing me a little village. About twenty homesteads were grouped close about an old wooden church, with a single green cupola, and tiny windows, brilliantly red in the evening glow. This was Svyatoe. I drove into its outskirts. A herd returning homewards overtook my cart, and with lowing, grunting and bleating moved by us. Young girls and bustling peasant women came to meet their beasts. Whiteheaded boys with merry shrieks went in chase of refractory pigs. The dust swirled along the street in light clouds, flushed crimson as they rose higher in the air.
I stopped at the house of the village elder, a crafty and clever ‘forester,’ one of those foresters of whom they say he can see two yards into the ground. Early next morning, accompanied by the village elder’s son, and another peasant called Yegor, I set off in a little cart with a pair of peasant’s horses, to shoot woodcocks and moorhens. The forest formed a continuous bluish ring all round the sky-line; there was reckoned to be two hundred acres, no more, of ploughed land round Svyatoe; but one had to go some five miles to find good places for game. The elder’s son was called Kondrat. He was a flaxen-haired, rosy-cheeked young fellow, with a good-natured, peaceable expression of face, obliging and talkative. He drove the horses. Yegor sat by my side. I want to say a few words about him.
He was considered the cleverest sportsman in the whole district. Every step of the ground for fifty miles round he had been over again and again. He seldom fired at a bird, for lack of powder and shot; but it was enough for him to decoy a moorhen or to detect the track of a grouse. Yegor had the character of being a straightforward fellow and ‘no talker.’ He did not care for talking and never exaggerated the number of birds he had taken–a trait rare in a sportsman. He was of medium height, thin, and had a pale, long face, and big, honest eyes. All his features, especially his straight and never-moving lips, were expressive of untroubled serenity. He gave a slight, as it were inward smile, whenever he uttered a word–very sweet was that quiet smile. He never drank spirits, and worked industriously; but nothing prospered with him. His wife was always ailing, his children didn’t live; he got poorer and poorer and could never pick up again. And there is no denying that a passion for the chase is no good for a peasant, and any one who ‘plays with a gun’ is sure to be a poor manager of his land. Either from constantly being in the forest, face to face with the stern and melancholy scenery of that inhuman country, or from the peculiar cast and formation of his character, there was noticeable in every action of Yegor’s a sort of modest dignity and stateliness–stateliness it was, and not melancholy–the stateliness of a majestic stag. He had in his time killed seven bears, lying in wait for them in the oats. The last he had only succeeded in killing on the fourth night of his ambush; the bear persisted in not turning sideways to him, and he had only one bullet. Yegor had killed him the day before my arrival. When Kondrat brought me to him, I found him in his back yard; squatting on his heels before the huge beast, he was cutting the fat out with a short, blunt knife.
‘What a fine fellow you’ve knocked over there!’ I observed.
Yegor raised his head and looked first at me, then at the dog, who had come with me.
‘If it’s shooting you’ve come after, sir, there are woodcocks at Moshnoy–three coveys, and five of moorhens,’ he observed, and set to work again.
With Yegor and with Kondrat I went out the next day in search of sport. We drove rapidly over the open ground surrounding Svyatoe, but when we got into the forest we crawled along at a walking pace once more.
‘Look, there’s a wood-pigeon,’ said Kondrat suddenly, turning to me: ‘better knock it over!’
Yegor looked in the direction Kondrat pointed, but said nothing. The wood-pigeon was over a hundred paces from us, and one can’t kill it at forty paces; there is such strength in its feathers. A few more remarks were made by the conversational Kondrat; but the forest hush had its influence even on him; he became silent. Only rarely exchanging a word or two, looking straight ahead, and listening to the puffing and snorting of the horses, we got at last to ‘Moshnoy.’ That is the name given to the older pine-forest, overgrown in places by fir saplings. We got out; Kondrat led the cart into the bushes, so that the gnats should not bite the horses. Yegor examined the cock of his gun and crossed himself: he never began anything without the sign of the cross.
The forest into which we had come was exceedingly old. I don’t know whether the Tartars had wandered over it, but Russian thieves or Lithuanians, in disturbed times, might certainly have hidden in its recesses. At a respectful distance from one another stood the mighty pines with their slightly curved, massive, pale-yellow trunks. Between them stood in single file others, rather younger. The ground was covered with greenish moss, sprinkled all over with dead pine-needles; blueberries grew in dense bushes; the strong perfume of the berries, like the smell of musk, oppressed the breathing. The sun could not pierce through the high network of the pine-branches; but it was stiflingly hot in the forest all the same, and not dark; like big drops of sweat the heavy, transparent resin stood out and slowly trickled down the coarse bark of the trees. The still air, with no light or shade in it, stung the face. Everything was silent; even our footsteps were not audible; we walked on the moss as on a carpet. Yegor in particular moved as silently as a shadow; even the brushwood did not crackle under his feet. He walked without haste, from time to time blowing a shrill note on a whistle; a woodcock soon answered back, and before my eyes darted into a thick fir-tree. But in vain Yegor pointed him out to me; however much I strained my eyes, I could not make him out. Yegor had to take a shot at him. We came upon two coveys of moorhens also. The cautious birds rose at a distance with an abrupt, heavy sound. We succeeded, however, in killing three young ones.
At one _meidan_ [Footnote 1: _Meidan_ is the name given to a place where tar has been made.–Author’s Note.] Yegor suddenly stopped and called me up.
‘A bear has been trying to get water,’ he observed, pointing to a broad, fresh scratch, made in the very middle of a hole covered with fine moss.
‘Is that the print of his paw?’ I inquired.
‘Yes; but the water has dried up. That’s the track of him too on that pine; he has been climbing after honey. He has cut into it with his claws as if with a knife.’
We went on making our way into the inner-most depths of the forest. Yegor only rarely looked upwards, and walked on serenely and confidently. I saw a high, round rampart, enclosed by a half-choked-up ditch.
‘What’s that? a _meidan_ too?’ I inquired.
‘No,’ answered Yegor; ‘here’s where the thieves’ town stood.’
‘Long ago?’
‘Long ago; our grandfathers remember it. Here they buried their treasure. And they took a mighty oath: on human blood.’
We went on another mile and a half; I began to feel thirsty.
‘Sit down a little while,’ said Yegor: ‘I will go for water; there is a well not far from here.’
He went away; I was left alone.
I sat down on a felled stump, leaned my elbows on my knees, and after a long stillness, raised my head and looked around me. Oh, how still and sullenly gloomy was everything around me–no, not gloomy even, but dumb, cold, and menacing at the same time! My heart sank. At that instant, at that spot, I had a sense of death breathing upon me, I felt I almost touched its perpetual closeness. If only one sound had vibrated, one momentary rustle had arisen, in the engulfing stillness of the pine-forest that hemmed me in on all sides! I let my head sink again, almost in terror; it was as though I had looked in, where no man ought to look…. I put my hand over my eyes–and all at once, as though at some mysterious bidding, I began to remember all my life….
There passed in a flash before me my childhood, noisy and peaceful, quarrelsome and good-hearted, with hurried joys and swift sorrows; then my youth rose up, vague, queer, self-conscious, with all its mistakes and beginnings, with disconnected work, and agitated indolence…. There came back, too, to my memory the comrades who shared those early aspirations … then like lightning in the night there came the gleam of a few bright memories … then the shadows began to grow and bear down on me, it was darker and darker about me, more dully and quietly the monotonous years ran by–and like a stone, dejection sank upon my heart. I sat without stirring and gazed, gazed with effort and perplexity, as though I saw all my life before me, as though scales had fallen from my eyes. Oh, what have I done! my lips involuntarily murmured in a bitter whisper. O life, life, where, how have you gone without a trace? How have you slipped through my clenched fingers? Have you deceived me, or was it that I knew not how to make use of your gifts? Is it possible? is this fragment, this poor handful of dusty ashes, all that is left of you? Is this cold, stagnant, unnecessary something–I, the I of old days? How? The soul was athirst for happiness so perfect, she rejected with such scorn all that was small, all that was insufficient, she waited: soon happiness would burst on her in a torrent–and has not one drop moistened the parched lips? Oh, my golden strings, you that once so delicately, so sweetly quivered,–I have never, it seems, heard your music … you had but just sounded–when you broke. Or, perhaps, happiness, the true happiness of all my life, passed close by me, smiled a resplendent smile upon me–and I failed to recognise its divine countenance. Or did it really visit me, sit at my bedside, and is forgotten by me, like a dream? Like a dream, I repeated disconsolately. Elusive images flitted over my soul, awakening in it something between pity and bewilderment … you too, I thought, dear, familiar, lost faces, you, thronging about me in this deadly solitude, why are you so profoundly and mournfully silent? From what abyss have you arisen? How am I to interpret your enigmatic glances? Are you greeting me, or bidding me farewell? Oh, can it be there is no hope, no turning back? Why are these heavy, belated drops trickling from my eyes? O heart, why, to what end, grieve more? try to forget if you would have peace, harden yourself to the meek acceptance of the last parting, to the bitter words ‘good-bye’ and ‘for ever.’ Do not look back, do not remember, do not strive to reach where it is light, where youth laughs, where hope is wreathed with the flowers of spring, where dovelike delight soars on azure wings, where love, like dew in the sunrise, flashes with tears of ecstasy; look not where is bliss, and faith and power–that is not our place!
‘Here is water for you,’ I heard Yegor’s musical voice behind me: ‘drink, with God’s blessing.’
I could not help starting; this living speech shook me, sent a delightful tremor all through me. It was as though I had fallen into unknown, dark depths, where all was hushed about me, and nothing could be heard but the soft, persistent moan of some unending grief…. I was faint and could not struggle, and all at once there floated down to me a friendly voice, and some mighty hand with one pull drew me up into the light of day. I looked round, and with unutterable consolation saw the serene and honest face of my guide. He stood easily and gracefully before me, and with his habitual smile held out a wet flask full of clear liquid…. I got up.
‘Let’s go on; lead the way,’ I said eagerly. We set off and wandered a long while, till evening. Directly the noonday heat was over, it became cold and dark so rapidly in the forest that one felt no desire to remain in it.
‘Away, restless mortals,’ it seemed whispering sullenly from each pine. We came out, but it was some time before we could find Kondrat. We shouted, called to him, but he did not answer. All of a sudden, in the profound stillness of the air, we heard his ‘wo, wo,’ sound distinctly in a ravine close to us…. The wind, which had suddenly sprung up, and as suddenly dropped again, had prevented him from hearing our calls. Only on the trees which stood some distance apart were traces of its onslaught to be seen; many of the leaves were blown inside out, and remained so, giving a variegated look to the motionless foliage. We got into the cart, and drove home. I sat, swaying to and fro, and slowly breathing in the damp, rather keen air; and all my recent reveries and regrets were drowned in the one sensation of drowsiness and fatigue, in the one desire to get back as soon as possible to the shelter of a warm house, to have a good drink of tea with cream, to nestle into the soft, yielding hay, and to sleep, to sleep, to sleep….
SECOND DAY
The next morning the three of us set off to the ‘Charred Wood.’ Ten years before, several thousand acres in the ‘Forest’ had been burnt down, and had not up to that time grown again; here and there, young firs and pines were shooting up, but for the most part there was nothing but moss and ashes. In this ‘Charred Wood,’ which is reckoned to be about nine miles from Svyatoe, there are all sorts of berries growing in great profusion, and it is a favourite haunt of grouse, who are very fond of strawberries and bilberries.
We were driving along in silence, when suddenly Kondrat raised his head.
‘Ah!’ he exclaimed: ‘why, that’s never Efrem standing yonder! ‘Morning to you, Alexandritch,’ he added, raising his voice, and lifting his cap.
A short peasant in a short, black smock, with a cord round the waist, came out from behind a tree, and approached the cart.
‘Why, have they let you off?’ inquired Kondrat.
‘I should think so!’ replied the peasant, and he grinned. ‘You don’t catch them keeping the likes of me.’
‘And what did Piotr Filippitch say to it?’
‘Filippov, is it? Oh, he’s all right.’
‘You don’t say so! Why, I thought, Alexandritch–well, brother, thought I, now you ‘re the goose that must lie down in the frying-pan!’
‘On account of Piotr Filippov, hey? Get along! We’ve seen plenty like him. He tries to pass for a wolf, and then slinks off like a dog.–Going shooting your honour, hey?’ the peasant suddenly inquired, turning his little, screwed-up eyes rapidly upon me, and at once dropping them again.
‘Yes.’
‘And whereabouts, now?’
‘To the Charred Wood,’ said Kondrat.
‘You ‘re going to the Charred Wood? mind you don’t get into the fire.’
‘Eh?’
‘I’ve seen a lot of woodcocks,’ the peasant went on, seeming all the while to be laughing, and making Kondrat no answer. ‘But you’ll never get there; as the crow flies it’ll be fifteen miles. Why, even Yegor here–not a doubt but he’s as at home in the forest as in his own back-yard, but even he won’t make his way there. Hullo, Yegor, you honest penny halfpenny soul!’ he shouted suddenly.
‘Good morning, Efrem,’ Yegor responded deliberately.
I looked with curiosity at this Efrem. It was long since I had seen such a queer face. He had a long, sharp nose, thick lips, and a scanty beard. His little blue eyes positively danced, like little imps. He stood in a free-and-easy pose, his arms akimbo, and did not touch his cap.
‘Going home for a visit, eh?’ Kondrat questioned him.
‘Go on! on a visit! It’s not the weather for that, my lad; it’s set fair. It’s all open and free, my dear; one may lie on the stove till winter time, not a dog will stir. When I was in the town, the clerk said: “Give us up,” says he, “‘Lexandritch; you just get out of the district, we’ll let you have a passport, first-class one …” but there, I’d pity on you Svyatoe fellows: you’d never get another thief like me.’
Kondrat laughed.
‘You will have your joke, uncle, you will, upon my word,’ he said, and he shook the reins. The horses started off.
‘Wo,’ said Efrem. The horses stopped. Kondrat did not like this prank.
‘Enough of your nonsense, Alexandritch,’ he observed in an undertone: ‘don’t you see we’re out with a gentleman? You mind; he’ll be angry.’
‘Get on with you, sea-drake! What should he be angry about? He’s a good-natured gentleman. You see, he’ll give me something to drink. Hey, master, give a poor scoundrel a dram! Won’t I drink it!’ he added, shrugging his shoulder up to his ear, and grating his teeth.
I could not help smiling, gave him a copper, and told Kondrat to drive on.
‘Much obliged, your honour,’ Efrem shouted after us in soldierly fashion. ‘And you’ll know, Kondrat, for the future from whom to learn manners. Faint heart never wins; ’tis boldness gains the day. When you come back, come to my place, d’ye hear? There’ll be drinking going on three days at home; there’ll be some necks broken, I can tell you; my wife’s a devil of a woman; our yard’s on the side of a precipice…. Ay, magpie, have a good time till your tail gets pinched.’ And with a sharp whistle, Efrem plunged into the bushes.
‘What sort of man is he?’ I questioned Kondrat, who, sitting in the front, kept shaking his head, as though deliberating with himself.
‘That fellow?’ replied Kondrat, and he looked down. ‘That fellow?’ he repeated.
‘Yes. Is he of your village?’
‘Yes, he’s a Svyatoe man. He’s a fellow…. You wouldn’t find the like of him, if you hunted for a hundred miles round. A thief and cheat–good Lord, yes! Another man’s property simply, as it were, takes his eye. You may bury a thing underground, and you won’t hide it from him; and as to money, you might sit on it, and he’d get it from under you without your noticing it.’
‘What a bold fellow he is!’
‘Bold? Yes, he’s not afraid of any one. But just look at him; he’s a beast by his physiognomy; you can see by his nose.’ (Kondrat often used to drive with gentlemen, and had been in the chief town of the province, and so liked on occasion to show off his attainments.) ‘There’s positively no doing anything with him. How many times they’ve taken him off to put him in the prison!–it’s simply trouble thrown away. They start tying him up, and he’ll say, “Come, why don’t you fasten that leg? fasten that one too, and a little tighter: I’ll have a little sleep meanwhile; and I shall get home before your escort.” And lo and behold! there he is back again, yes, back again, upon my soul! Well as we all about here know the forest, being used to it from childhood, we’re no match for him there. Last summer he came at night straight across from Altuhin to Svyatoe, and no one had ever been known to walk it–it’ll be over thirty miles. And he steals honey too; no one can beat him at that; and the bees don’t sting him. There’s not a hive he hasn’t plundered.’
‘I expect he doesn’t spare the wild bees either?’
‘Well, no, I won’t lay a false charge against him. That sin’s never been observed in him. The wild bees’ nest is a holy thing with us. A hive is shut in by fences; there’s a watch kept; if you get the honey–it’s your luck; but the wild bee is a thing of God’s, not guarded; only the bear touches it.’
‘Because he is a bear,’ remarked Yegor.
‘Is he married?’
‘To be sure. And he has a son. And won’t he be a thief too, the son! He’s taken after his father. And he’s training him now too. The other day he took a pot with some old coppers in it, stolen somewhere, I’ve no doubt, went and buried it in a clearing in the forest, and went home and sent his son to the clearing. “Till you find the pot,” says he, “I won’t give you anything to eat, or let you into the place.” The son stayed the whole day in the forest, and spent the night there, but he found the pot. Yes, he’s a smart chap, that Efrem. When he’s at home, he’s a civil fellow, presses every one; you may eat and drink as you will, and there’ll be dancing got up at his place and merry-making of all sorts. And when he comes to the meeting–we have a parish meeting, you know, in our village–well, no one talks better sense than he does; he’ll come up behind, listen, say a word as if he chopped it off, and away again; and a weighty word it’ll be, too. But when he’s about in the forest, ah! that means trouble! We’ve to look out for mischief. Though, I must say, he doesn’t touch his own people unless he’s in a fix. If he meets a Svyatoe man: “Go along with you, brother,” he’ll shout, a long way away; “the forest devil’s upon me: I shall kill you!”–it’s a bad business!’
‘What can you all be thinking about? A whole district can’t get even with one man?’
‘Well, that’s just how it is, any way.’
‘Is he a sorcerer, then?’
‘Who can say! Here, some days ago, he crept round at night to the deacon’s near, after the honey, and the deacon was watching the hive himself. Well, he caught him, and in the dark he gave him a good hiding. When he’d done, Efrem, he says to him: “But d’you know who it is you’ve been beating?” The deacon, when he knew him by his voice, was fairly dumfoundered.
“Well, my good friend,” says Efrem, “you won’t get off so easily for this.” The deacon fell down at his feet. “Take,” says he, “what you please.” “No,” says he. “I’ll take it from you at my own time and as I choose.” And what do you think? Since that day the deacon’s as though he’d been scalded; he wanders about like a ghost. “It’s taken,” says he, “all the heart out of me; it was a dreadful, powerful saying, to be sure, the brigand fastened upon me.” That’s how it is with him, with the deacon.’
‘That deacon must be a fool,’ I observed.
‘A fool? Well, but what do you say to this? There was once an order issued to seize this fellow, Efrem. We had a police commissary then, a sharp man. And so a dozen chaps went off into the forest to take Efrem. They look, and there he is coming to meet them…. One of them shouts, “Here he is, hold him, tie him!” But Efrem stepped into the forest and cut himself a branch, two fingers’ thickness, like this, and then out he skips into the road again, looking so frightful, so terrible, and gives the command like a general at a review: “On your knees!” All of them fairly fell down. “But who,” says he, “shouted hold him, tie him? You, Seryoga?” The fellow simply jumped up and ran … and Efrem after him, and kept swinging his branch at his heels…. For nearly a mile he stroked him down. And afterwards he never ceased to regret: “Ah,” he’d say, “it is annoying I didn’t lay him up for the confession.” For it was just before St. Philip’s day. Well, they changed the police commissary soon after, but it all ended the same way.’
‘Why did they all give in to him?’
‘Why! well, it is so….’
‘He has frightened you all, and now he does as he likes with you.’
‘Frightened, yes…. He’d frighten any one. And he’s a wonderful hand at contrivances, my goodness, yes! I once came upon him in the forest; there was a heavy rain falling; I was for edging away…. But he looked at me, and beckoned to me with his hand like this. “Come along,” says he, “Kondrat, don’t be afraid. Let me show you how to live in the forest, and to keep dry in the rain.” I went up to him, and he was sitting under a fir-tree, and he’d made a fire of damp twigs: the smoke hung about in the fir-tree, and kept the rain from dripping through. I was astonished at him then. And I’ll tell you what he contrived one time’ (and Kondrat laughed); ‘he really did do a funny thing. They’d been thrashing the oats at the thrashing-floor, and they hadn’t finished; they hadn’t time to rake up the last heap; well, they ‘d set two watch-men by it for the night, and they weren’t the boldest-hearted of the chaps either. Well, they were sitting and gossiping, and Efrem takes and stuffs his shirt-sleeves full of straw, ties up the wrist-bands, and puts the shirt up over his head. And so he steals up in that shape to the thrashing-floor, and just pops out from behind the corner and gives them a peep of his horns. One chap says to the other: “Do you see?” “Yes,” says the other, and didn’t he give a screech all of a sudden … and then the fences creaked and nothing more was seen of them. Efrem shovelled up the oats into a bag and dragged it off home. He told the story himself afterwards. He put them to shame, he did, the chaps…. He did really!’
Kondrat laughed again. And Yegor smiled. ‘So the fences creaked and that was all?’ he commented. ‘There was nothing more seen of them,’ Kondrat assented. ‘They were simply gone in a flash.’
We were all silent again. Suddenly Kondrat started and sat up.
‘Eh, mercy upon us!’ he ejaculated; ‘surely it’s never a fire!’
‘Where, where?’ we asked.
‘Yonder, see, in front, where we ‘re going…. A fire it is! Efrem there, Efrem–why, he foretold it! If it’s not his doing, the damned fellow!…’
I glanced in the direction Kondrat was pointing. Two or three miles ahead of us, behind a green strip of low fir saplings, there really was a thick column of dark blue smoke slowly rising from the ground, gradually twisting and coiling into a cap-shaped cloud; to the right and left of it could be seen others, smaller and whiter.
A peasant, all red and perspiring, in nothing but his shirt, with his hair hanging dishevelled about his scared face, galloped straight towards us, and with difficulty stopped his hastily bridled horse.
‘Mates,’ he inquired breathlessly, ‘haven’t you seen the foresters?’
‘No, we haven’t. What is it? is the forest on fire?’
‘Yes. We must get the people together, or else if it gets to Trosnoe …’
The peasant tugged with his elbows, pounded with his heels on the horse’s sides…. It galloped off.
Kondrat, too, whipped up his pair. We drove straight towards the smoke, which was spreading more and more widely; in places it suddenly grew black and rose up high. The nearer we moved to it, the more indefinite became its outlines; soon all the air was clouded over, there was a strong smell of burning, and here and there between the trees, with a strange, weird quivering in the sunshine, gleamed the first pale red tongues of flame.
‘Well, thank God,’ observed Kondrat, ‘it seems it’s an overground fire.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Overground? One that runs along over the earth. With an underground fire, now, it’s a difficult job to deal. What’s one to do, when the earth’s on fire for a whole yard’s depth? There’s only one means of safety–digging ditches,–and do you suppose that’s easy? But an overground fire’s nothing. It only scorches the grasses and burns the dry leaves! The forest will be all the better for it. Ouf, though, mercy on us, look how it flares!’
We drove almost up to the edge of the fire. I got down and went to meet it. It was neither dangerous nor difficult. The fire was running over the scanty pine-forest against the wind; it moved in an uneven line, or, to speak more accurately, in a dense jagged wall of curved tongues. The smoke was carried away by the wind. Kondrat had told the truth; it really was an overground fire, which only scorched the grass and passed on without finishing its work, leaving behind it a black and smoking, but not even smouldering, track. At times, it is true, when the fire came upon a hole filled with dry wood and twigs, it suddenly and with a kind of peculiar, rather vindictive roar, rose up in long, quivering points; but it soon sank down again and ran on as before, with a slight hiss and crackle. I even noticed, more than once, an oak-bush, with dry hanging leaves, hemmed in all round and yet untouched, except for a slight singeing at its base. I must own I could not understand why the dry leaves were not burned. Kondrat explained to me that it was owing to the fact that the fire was overground, ‘that’s to say, not angry.’ ‘But it’s fire all the same,’ I protested. ‘Overground fire,’ repeated Kondrat. However, overground as it was, the fire, none the less, produced its effect: hares raced up and down with a sort of disorder, running back with no sort of necessity into the neighbourhood of the fire; birds fell down in the smoke and whirled round and round; horses looked back and neighed, the forest itself fairly hummed–and man felt discomfort from the heat suddenly beating into his face….
‘What are we looking at?’ said Yegor suddenly, behind my back. ‘Let’s go on.’
‘But where are we to go?’ asked Kondrat.
‘Take the left, over the dry bog; we shall get through.’
We turned to the left, and got through, though it was sometimes difficult for both the horses and the cart.
The whole day we wandered over the Charred Wood. At evening–the sunset had not yet begun to redden in the sky, but the shadows from the trees already lay long and motionless, and in the grass one could feel that chill that comes before the dew–I lay down by the roadside near the cart in which Kondrat, without haste, was harnessing the horses after their feed, and I recalled my cheerless reveries of the day before. Everything around was as still as the previous evening, but there was not the forest, stifling and weighing down the spirit. On the dry moss, on the crimson grasses, on the soft dust of the road, on the slender stems and pure little leaves of the young birch-trees, lay the clear soft light of the no longer scorching, sinking sun. Everything was resting, plunged in soothing coolness; nothing was yet asleep, but everything was getting ready for the restoring slumber of evening and night-time. Everything seemed to be saying to man: ‘Rest, brother of ours; breathe lightly, and grieve not, thou too, at the sleep close before thee.’ I raised my head and saw at the very end of a delicate twig one of those large flies with emerald head, long body, and four transparent wings, which the fanciful French call ‘maidens,’ while our guileless people has named them ‘bucket-yokes.’ For a long while, more than an hour, I did not take my eyes off her. Soaked through and through with sunshine, she did not stir, only from time to time turning her head from side to side and shaking her lifted wings … that was all. Looking at her, it suddenly seemed to me that I understood the life of nature, understood its clear and unmistakable though, to many, still mysterious significance. A subdued, quiet animation, an unhasting, restrained use of sensations and powers, an equilibrium of health in each separate creature–there is her very basis, her unvarying law, that is what she stands upon and holds to. Everything that goes beyond this level, above or below–it makes no difference–she flings away as worthless. Many insects die as soon as they know the joys of love, which destroy the equilibrium. The sick beast plunges into the thicket and expires there alone: he seems to feel that he no longer has the right to look upon the sun that is common to all, nor to breathe the open air; he has not the right to live;–and the man who from his own fault or from the fault of others is faring ill in the world–ought, at least, to know how to keep silence.
‘Well, Yegor!’ cried Kondrat all at once. He had already settled himself on the box of the cart and was shaking and playing with the reins. ‘Come, sit down. What are you so thoughtful about? Still about the cow?’
‘About the cow? What cow?’ I repeated, and looked at Yegor: calm and stately as ever, he certainly did seem thoughtful, and was gazing away into the distance towards the fields already beginning to get dark.
‘Don’t you know?’ answered Kondrat; ‘his last cow died last night. He has no luck.–What are you going to do?’….
Yegor sat down on the box, without speaking, and we drove off. ‘That man knows how to bear in silence,’ I thought.
YAKOV PASINKOV
I
It happened in Petersburg, in the winter, on the first day of the carnival. I had been invited to dinner by one of my schoolfellows, who enjoyed in his youth the reputation of being as modest as a maiden, and turned out in the sequel a person by no means over rigid in his conduct. He is dead now, like most of my schoolfellows. There were to be present at the dinner, besides me, Konstantin Alexandrovitch Asanov, and a literary celebrity of those days. The literary celebrity kept us waiting for him, and finally sent a note that he was not coming, and in place of him there turned up a little light-haired gentleman, one of the everlasting uninvited guests with whom Petersburg abounds.
The dinner lasted a long while; our host did not spare the wine, and by degrees our heads were affected. Everything that each of us kept hidden in his heart–and who is there that has not something hidden in his heart?–came to the surface. Our host’s face suddenly lost its modest and reserved expression; his eyes shone with a brazen-faced impudence, and a vulgar grin curved his lips; the light-haired gentleman laughed in a feeble way, with a senseless crow; but Asanov surprised me more than any one. The man had always been conspicuous for his sense of propriety, but now he began by suddenly rubbing his hand over his forehead, giving himself airs, boasting of his connections, and continually alluding to a certain uncle of his, a very important personage…. I positively should not have known him; he was unmistakably jeering at us … he all but avowed his contempt for our society. Asanov’s insolence began to exasperate me.
‘Listen,’ I said to him; ‘if we are such poor creatures to your thinking, you’d better go and see your illustrious uncle. But possibly he’s not at home to you.’
Asanov made me no reply, and went on passing his hand across his forehead.
‘What a set of people!’ he said again; ‘they’ve never been in any decent society, never been acquainted with a single decent woman, while I have here,’ he cried, hurriedly pulling a pocket-book out of his side-pocket and tapping it with his hand, ‘a whole pack of letters from a girl whom you wouldn’t find the equal of in the whole world.’
Our host and the light-haired gentleman paid no attention to Asanov’s last words; they were holding each other by their buttons, and both relating something; but I pricked up my ears.
‘Oh, you ‘re bragging, Mr. nephew of an illustrious personage,’ I said, going up to Asanov; ‘you haven’t any letters at all.’
‘Do you think so?’ he retorted, and he looked down loftily at me; ‘what’s this, then?’ He opened the pocket-book, and showed me about a dozen letters addressed to him…. A familiar handwriting, I fancied…. I feel the flush of shame mounting to my cheeks … my self-love is suffering horribly…. No one likes to own to a mean action…. But there is nothing for it: when I began my story, I knew I should have to blush to my ears in the course of it. And so, I am bound to harden my heart and confess that….
Well, this was what passed: I took advantage of the intoxicated condition of Asanov, who had carelessly dropped the letters on the champagne-stained tablecloth (my own head was dizzy enough too), and hurriedly ran my eyes over one of the letters….
My heart stood still…. Alas! I was myself in love with the girl who had written to Asanov, and I could have no doubt now that she loved him. The whole letter, which was in French, expressed tenderness and devotion….
‘Mon cher ami Constantin!’ so it began … and it ended with the words: ‘be careful as before, and I will be yours or no one’s.’
Stunned as by a thunderbolt, I sat for a few instants motionless; at last I regained my self-possession, jumped up, and rushed out of the room.
A quarter of an hour later I was back at home in my own lodgings.
* * * * *
The family of the Zlotnitskys was one of the first whose acquaintance I made on coming to Petersburg from Moscow. It consisted of a father and mother, two daughters, and a son. The father, a man already grey, but still vigorous, who had been in the army, held a fairly important position, spent the morning in a government office, went to sleep after dinner, and in the evening played cards at his club…. He was seldom at home, spoke little and unwillingly, looked at one from under his eyebrows with an expression half surly, half indifferent, and read nothing except books of travels and geography. Sometimes he was unwell, and then he would shut himself up in his own room, and paint little pictures, or tease the old grey parrot, Popka. His wife, a sickly, consumptive woman, with hollow black eyes and a sharp nose, did not leave her sofa for days together, and was always embroidering cushion-covers in canvas. As far as I could observe, she was rather afraid of her husband, as though she had somehow wronged him at some time or other. The elder daughter, Varvara, a plump, rosy, fair-haired girl of eighteen, was always sitting at the window, watching the people that passed by. The son, who was being educated in a government school, was only seen at home on Sundays, and he, too, did not care to waste his words. Even the younger daughter, Sophia, the girl with whom I was in love, was of a silent disposition. In the Zlotnitskys’ house there reigned a perpetual stillness; it was only broken by the piercing screams of Popka, but visitors soon got used to these, and were conscious again of the burden and oppression of the eternal stillness. Visitors, however, seldom looked in upon the Zlotnitskys; their house was a dull one. The very furniture, the red paper with yellow patterns in the drawing-room, the numerous rush-bottomed chairs in the dining-room, the faded wool-work cushions, embroidered with figures of girls and dogs, on the sofa, the branching lamps, and the gloomy-looking portraits on the walls–everything inspired an involuntary melancholy, about everything there clung a sense of chill and flatness. On my arrival in Petersburg, I had thought it my duty to call on the Zlotnitskys. They were relations of my mother’s. I managed with difficulty to sit out an hour with them, and it was a long while before I went there again. But by degrees I took to going oftener and oftener. I was drawn there by Sophia, whom I had not cared for at first, and with whom I finally fell in love.
She was a slender, almost thin, girl of medium height, with a pale face, thick black hair, and big brown eyes, always half closed. Her severe and well-defined features, especially her tightly shut lips, showed determination and strength of will. At home they knew her to be a girl with a will of her own….
‘She’s like her eldest sister, like Katerina,’ Madame Zlotnitsky said one day, as she sat alone with me (in her husband’s presence she did not dare to mention the said Katerina). ‘You don’t know her; she’s in the Caucasus, married. At thirteen, only fancy, she fell in love with her husband, and announced to us at the time that she would never marry any one else. We did everything we could–nothing was of any use. She waited till she was three-and-twenty, and braved her father’s anger, and so married her idol. There is no saying what Sonitchka might not do! The Lord preserve her from such stubbornness! But I am afraid for her; she’s only sixteen now, and there’s no turning her….’
Mr. Zlotnitsky came in, and his wife was instantly silent.
What had captivated me in Sophia was not her strength of will–no; but with all her dryness, her lack of vivacity and imagination, she had a special charm of her own, the charm of straightforwardness, genuine sincerity, and purity of heart. I respected her as much as I loved her…. It seemed to me that she too looked with friendly eyes on me; to have my illusions as to her feeling for me shattered, and her love for another man proved conclusively, was a blow to me.
The unlooked-for discovery I had made astonished me the more as Asanov was not often at the Zlotnitskys’ house, much less so than I, and had shown no marked preference for Sonitchka. He was a handsome, dark fellow, with expressive but rather heavy features, with brilliant, prominent eyes, with a large white forehead, and full red lips under fine moustaches. He was very discreet, but severe in his behaviour, confident in his criticisms and utterances, and dignified in his silence. It was obvious that he thought a great deal of himself. Asanov rarely laughed, and then with closed teeth, and he never danced. He was rather loosely and clumsily built. He had at one time served in the –th regiment, and was spoken of as a capable officer.
‘A strange thing!’ I ruminated, lying on the sofa; ‘how was it I noticed nothing?’ … ‘Be careful as before’: those words in Sophia’s letter suddenly recurred to my memory. ‘Ah!’ I thought: ‘that’s it! What a sly little hussy! And I thought her open and sincere…. Wait a bit, that’s all; I’ll let you know….’
But at this point, if I can trust my memory, I began weeping bitterly, and could not get to sleep all night.
* * * * *
Next day at two o’clock I set off to the Zlotnitskys’. The father was not at home, and his wife was not sitting in her usual place; after the pancake festival of the preceding day, she had a headache, and had gone to lie down in her bedroom. Varvara was standing with her shoulder against the window, looking into the street; Sophia was walking up and down the room with her arms folded across her bosom; Popka was shrieking.
‘Ah! how do you do?’ said Varvara lazily, directly I came into the room, and she added at once in an undertone, ‘There goes a peasant with a tray on his head.’ … (She had the habit of keeping up a running commentary on the passers-by to herself.)
‘How do you do?’ I responded; ‘how do you do, Sophia Nikolaevna? Where is Tatiana Vassilievna?’
‘She has gone to lie down,’ answered Sophia, still pacing the room.
‘We had pancakes,’ observed Varvara, without turning round. ‘Why didn’t you come? … Where can that clerk be going?’ ‘Oh, I hadn’t time.’ (‘Present arms!’ the parrot screeched shrilly.) ‘How Popka is shrieking to-day!’
‘He always does shriek like that,’ observed Sophia.
We were all silent for a time.
‘He has gone in at the gate,’ said Varvara, and she suddenly got up on the window-sill and opened the window.
‘What are you about?’ asked Sophia.
‘There’s a beggar,’ responded Varvara. She bent down, picked up a five-copeck piece from the window; the remains of a fumigating pastille still stood in a grey heap of ashes on the copper coin, as she flung it into the street; then she slammed the window to and jumped heavily down to the floor….
‘I had a very pleasant time yesterday,’ I began, seating myself in an arm-chair. ‘I dined with a friend of mine; Konstantin Alexandritch was there…. (I looked at Sophia; not an eyebrow quivered on her face.) ‘And I must own,’ I continued, ‘we’d a good deal of wine; we emptied eight bottles between the four of us.’
‘Really!’ Sophia articulated serenely, and she shook her head.
‘Yes,’ I went on, slightly irritated at her composure: ‘and do you know what, Sophia Nikolaevna, it’s a true saying, it seems, that in wine is truth.’
‘How so?’
‘Konstantin Alexandritch made us laugh. Only fancy, he began all at once passing his hand over his forehead like this, and saying: “I’m a fine fellow! I’ve an uncle a celebrated man!”….’
‘Ha, ha!’ came Varvara’s short, abrupt laugh.
….’Popka! Popka! Popka!’ the parrot dinned back at her.
Sophia stood still in front of me, and looked me straight in the face.
‘And you, what did you say?’ she asked; ‘don’t you remember?’
I could not help blushing.
‘I don’t remember! I expect I was pretty absurd too. It certainly is dangerous to drink,’ I added with significant emphasis; ‘one begins chattering at once, and one’s apt to say what no one ought to know. One’s sure to be sorry for it afterwards, but then it’s too late.’
‘Why, did you let out some secret?’ asked Sophia.
‘I am not referring to myself.’
Sophia turned away, and began walking up and down the room again. I stared at her, raging inwardly. ‘Upon my word,’ I thought, ‘she is a child, a baby, and how she has herself in hand! She’s made of stone, simply. But wait a bit….’
‘Sophia Nikolaevna …’ I said aloud.
Sophia stopped.
‘What is it?’
‘Won’t you play me something on the piano? By the way, I’ve something I want to say to you,’ I added, dropping my voice.
Sophia, without saying a word, walked into the other room; I followed her. She came to a standstill at the piano.
‘What am I to play you?’ she inquired.
‘What you like … one of Chopin’s nocturnes.’
Sophia began the nocturne. She played rather badly, but with feeling. Her sister played nothing but polkas and waltzes, and even that very seldom. She would go sometimes with her indolent step to the piano, sit down, let her coat slip from her shoulders down to her elbows (I never saw her without a coat), begin playing a polka very loud, and without finishing it, begin another, then she would suddenly heave a sigh, get up, and go back again to the window. A queer creature was that Varvara!
I sat down near Sophia.
‘Sophia Nikolaevna,’ I began, watching her intently from one side. ‘I ought to tell you a piece of news, news disagreeable to me.’
‘News? what is it?’
‘I’ll tell you…. Up till now I have been mistaken in you, completely mistaken.’
‘How was that?’ she rejoined, going on playing, and keeping her eyes fixed on her fingers.
‘I imagined you to be open; I imagined that you were incapable of hypocrisy, of hiding your feelings, deceiving….’
Sophia bent her face closer over the music.
‘I don’t understand you.’
‘And what’s more,’ I went on; ‘I could never have conceived that you, at your age, were already quite capable of acting a part in such masterly fashion.’
Sophia’s hands faintly trembled above the keys. ‘Why are you saying this?’ she said, still not looking at me; ‘I play a part?’
‘Yes, you do.’ (She smiled … I was seized with spiteful fury.) … ‘You pretend to be indifferent to a man and … and you write letters to him,’ I added in a whisper.
Sophia’s cheeks grew white, but she did not turn to me: she played the nocturne through to the end, got up, and closed the piano.
‘Where are you going?’ I asked her in some perplexity. ‘You have no answer to make me?’
‘What answer can I make you? I don’t know what you ‘re talking about…. And I am not good at pretending….’
She began putting by the music.
The blood rushed to my head. ‘No; you know what I am talking about,’ I said, and I too got up from my seat; ‘or if you like, I will remind you directly of some of your expressions in one letter: “be as careful as before”….’
Sophia gave a faint start.
‘I never should have expected this of you,’ she said at last.
‘I never should have expected,’ I retorted, ‘that you, Sophia Nikolaevna, would have deigned to notice a man who …’
Sophia turned with a rapid movement to me; I instinctively stepped back a little from her; her eyes, always half closed, were so wide open that they looked immense, and they glittered wrathfully under her frowning brows.
‘Oh! if that’s it,’ she said, ‘let me tell you that I love that man, and that it’s absolutely no consequence to me what you think about him or about my love for him. And what business is it of yours? … What right have you to speak of this? If I have made up my mind …’
She stopped speaking, and went hurriedly out of the room. I stood still. I felt all of a sudden so uncomfortable and so ashamed that I hid my face in my hands. I realised all the impropriety, all the baseness of my behaviour, and, choked with shame and remorse, I stood as it were in disgrace. ‘Mercy,’ I thought, ‘what I’ve done!’
‘Anton Nikititch,’ I heard the maid-servant saying in the outer-room, ‘get a glass of water, quick, for Sophia Nikolaevna.’
‘What’s wrong?’ answered the man.
‘I fancy she’s crying….’
I started up and went into the drawing-room for my hat.
‘What were you talking about to Sonitchka?’ Varvara inquired indifferently, and after a brief pause she added in an undertone, ‘Here’s that clerk again.’
I began saying good-bye.
‘Why are you going? Stay a little; mamma is coming down directly.’
‘No; I can’t now,’ I said: ‘I had better call and see her another time.’
At that instant, to my horror, to my positive horror, Sophia walked with resolute steps into the drawing-room. Her face was paler than usual, and her eyelids were a little red. She never even glanced at me.
‘Look, Sonia,’ observed Varvara; ‘there’s a clerk keeps continually passing our house.’
‘A spy, perhaps…’ Sophia remarked coldly and contemptuously.
This was too much. I went away, and I really don’t know how I got home.
I felt very miserable, wretched and miserable beyond description. In twenty-four hours two such cruel blows! I had learned that Sophia loved another man, and I had for ever forfeited her respect. I felt myself so utterly annihilated and disgraced that I could not even feel indignant with myself. Lying on the sofa with my face turned to the wall, I was revelling in the first rush of despairing misery, when I suddenly heard footsteps in the room. I lifted my head and saw one of my most intimate friends, Yakov Pasinkov.
I was ready to fly into a rage with any one who had come into my room that day, but with Pasinkov I could never be angry. Quite the contrary; in spite of the sorrow devouring me, I was inwardly rejoiced at his coming, and I nodded to him. He walked twice up and down the room, as his habit was, clearing his throat, and stretching out his long limbs; then he stood a minute facing me in silence, and in silence he seated himself in a corner.
I had known Pasinkov a very long while, almost from childhood. He had been brought up at the same private school, kept by a German, Winterkeller, at which I had spent three years. Yakov’s father, a poor major on the retired list, a very honest man, but a little deranged mentally, had brought him, when a boy of seven, to this German; had paid for him for a year in advance, and had then left Moscow and been lost sight of completely…. From time to time there were dark, strange rumours about him. Eight years later it was known as a positive fact that he had been drowned in a flood when crossing the Irtish. What had taken him to Siberia, God knows. Yakov had no other relations; his mother had long been dead. He was simply left stranded on Winterkeller’s hands. Yakov had, it is true, a distant relation, a great-aunt; but she was so poor, that she was afraid at first to go to her nephew, for fear she should have the care of him thrust upon her. Her fears turned out to be groundless; the kind-hearted German kept Yakov with him, let him study with his other pupils, fed him (dessert, however, was not offered him except on Sundays), and rigged him out in clothes cut out of the cast-off morning-gowns–usually snuff-coloured–of his mother, an old Livonian lady, still alert and active in spite of her great age. Owing to all these circumstances, and owing generally to Yakov’s inferior position in the school, his schoolfellows treated him in rather a casual fashion, looked down upon him, and used to call him ‘mammy’s dressing-gown,’ the ‘nephew of the mob-cap’ (his aunt invariably wore a very peculiar mob-cap with a bunch of yellow ribbons sticking straight upright, like a globe artichoke, upon it), and sometimes the ‘son of Yermak’ (because his father had, like that hero, been drowned in the Irtish). But in spite of those nicknames, in spite of his ridiculous garb, and his absolute destitution, every one was fond of him, and indeed it was impossible not to be fond of him; a sweeter, nobler nature, I imagine, has never existed upon earth. He was very good at lessons too.
When I saw him first, he was sixteen years old, and I was only just thirteen. I was an exceedingly selfish and spoilt boy; I had grown up in a rather wealthy house, and so, on entering the school, I lost no time in making friends with a little prince, an object of special solicitude to Winterkeller, and with two or three other juvenile aristocrats; while I gave myself great airs with all the rest. Pasinkov I did not deign to notice at all. I regarded the long, gawky lad, in a shapeless coat and short trousers, which showed his coarse thread stockings, as some sort of page-boy, one of the house-serfs–at best, a person of the working class. Pasinkov was extremely courteous and gentle to everybody, though he never sought the society of any one. If he were rudely treated, he was neither humiliated nor sullen; he simply withdrew and held himself aloof, with a sort of regretful look, as it were biding his time. This was just how he behaved with me. About two months passed. One bright summer day I happened to go out of the playground after a noisy game of leap-frog, and walking into the garden I saw Pasinkov sitting on a bench under a high lilac-bush. He was reading. I glanced at the cover of the book as I passed, and read _Schiller’s Werke_ on the back. I stopped short.
‘Do you mean to say you know German?’ I questioned Pasinkov….
I feel ashamed to this day as I recall all the arrogance there was in the very sound of my voice…. Pasinkov softly raised his small but expressive eyes and looked at me.
‘Yes,’ he answered; ‘do you?’
‘I should hope so!’ I retorted, feeling insulted at the question, and I was about to go on my way, but something held me back.
‘What is it you are reading of Schiller?’ I asked, with the same haughty insolence.
‘At this moment I am reading “Resignation,” a beautiful poem. Would you like me to read it to you? Come and sit here by me on the bench.’
I hesitated a little, but I sat down. Pasinkov began reading. He knew
German far better than I did. He had to explain the meaning of several lines for me. But already I felt no shame at my ignorance and his superiority to me. From that day, from the very hour of our reading together in the garden, in the shade of the lilac-bush, I loved Pasinkov with my whole soul, I attached myself to him and fell completely under his sway.
I have a vivid recollection of his appearance in those days. He changed very little, however, later on. He was tall, thin, and rather awkwardly built, with a long back, narrow shoulders, and a hollow chest, which made him look rather frail and delicate, although as a fact he had nothing to complain of on the score of health. His large, dome-shaped head was carried a little on one side; his soft, flaxen hair straggled in lank locks about his slender neck. His face was not handsome, and might even have struck one as absurd, owing to the long, full, and reddish nose, which seemed almost to overhang his wide, straight mouth. But his open brow was splendid; and when he smiled, his little grey eyes gleamed with such mild and affectionate goodness, that every one felt warmed and cheered at heart at the very sight of him. I remember his voice too, soft and even, with a peculiar sort of sweet huskiness in it. He spoke, as a rule, little, and with noticeable difficulty. But when he warmed up, his words flowed freely, and–strange to say!–his voice grew still softer, his glance seemed turned inward and lost its fire, while his whole face faintly glowed. On his lips the words ‘goodness,’ ‘truth,’ ‘life,’ ‘science,’ ‘love,’ however enthusiastically they were uttered, never rang with a false note. Without strain, without effort, he stepped into the realm of the ideal; his pure soul was at any moment ready to stand before the ‘holy shrine of beauty’; it awaited only the welcoming call, the contact of another soul…. Pasinkov was an idealist, one of the last idealists whom it has been my lot to come across. Idealists, as we all know, are all but extinct in these days; there are none of them, at any rate, among the young people of to day. So much the worse for the young people of to-day!
About three years I spent with Pasinkov, ‘soul in soul,’ as the saying is.
I was the confidant of his first love. With what grateful sympathy and intentness I listened to his avowal! The object of his passion was a niece of Winterkeller’s, a fair-haired, pretty little German, with a chubby, almost childish little face, and confidingly soft blue eyes. She was very kind and sentimental: she loved Mattison, Uhland, and Schiller, and repeated their verses very sweetly in her timid, musical voice. Pasinkov’s love was of the most platonic. He only saw his beloved on Sundays, when she used to come and play at forfeits with the Winterkeller children, and he had very little conversation with her. But once, when she said to him, ‘mein lieber, lieber Herr Jacob!’ he did not sleep all night from excess of bliss. It never even struck him at the time that she called all his schoolfellows ‘mein lieber.’ I remember, too, his grief and dejection when the news suddenly reached us that Fräulein Frederike–that was her name–was going to be married to Herr Kniftus, the owner of a prosperous butcher’s shop, a very handsome man, and well educated too; and that she was marrying him, not simply in submission to parental authority, but positively from love. It was a bitter blow for Pasinkov, and his sufferings were particularly severe on the day of the young people’s first visit. The former Fräulein, now Frau, Frederike presented him, once more addressing him as ‘lieber Herr Jacob,’ to her husband, who was all splendour from top to toe; his eyes, his black hair brushed up into a tuft, his forehead and his teeth, and his coat buttons, and the chain on his waistcoat, everything, down to the boots on his rather large, turned-out feet, shone brilliantly. Pasinkov pressed Herr Kniftus’s hand, and wished him (and the wish was sincere, that I am certain) complete and enduring happiness. This took place in my presence. I remember with what admiration and sympathy I gazed at Yakov. I thought him a hero!…. And afterwards, what mournful conversations passed between us. ‘Seek consolation in art,’ I said to him. ‘Yes,’ he answered me; ‘and in poetry.’ ‘And in friendship,’ I added. ‘And in friendship,’ he repeated. Oh, happy days!…
It was a grief to me to part from Pasinkov. Just before I left school, he had, after prolonged efforts and difficulties, after a correspondence often amusing, succeeded in obtaining his certificates of birth and baptism and his passport, and had entered the university. He still went on living at Winterkeller’s expense; but instead of home-made jackets and breeches, he was provided now with ordinary attire, in return for lessons on various subjects, which he gave the younger pupils. Pasinkov was unchanged in his behaviour to me up to the end of my time at the school, though the difference in our ages began to be more noticeable, and I, I remember, grew jealous of some of his new student friends. His influence on me was most beneficial. It was a pity it did not last longer. To give a single instance: as a child I was in the habit of telling lies…. In Yakov’s presence I could not bring my tongue to utter an untruth. What I particularly loved was walking alone with him, or pacing by his side up and down the room, listening while he, not looking at me, read poetry in his soft, intense voice. It positively seemed to me that we were slowly, gradually, getting away from the earth, and soaring away to some radiant, glorious land of mystery…. I remember one night. We were sitting together under the same lilac-bush; we were fond of that spot. All our companions were asleep; but we had softly got up, dressed, fumbling in the dark, and stealthily stepped out ‘to dream.’ It was fairly warm out of doors, but a fresh breeze blew now and then and made us huddle closer together. We talked, we talked a lot, and with much warmth–so much so, that we positively interrupted each other, though we did not argue. In the sky gleamed stars innumerable. Yakov raised his eyes, and pressing my hand he softly cried out:
‘Above our heads
The sky with the eternal stars…. Above the stars their Maker….’
A thrill of awe ran through me; I felt cold all over, and sank on his shoulder…. My heart was full…. Where are those raptures? Alas! where youth is.
In Petersburg I met Yakov again eight years after. I had only just been appointed to a position in the service, and some one had got him a little post in some department. Our meeting was most joyful. I shall never forget the moment when, sitting alone one day at home, I suddenly heard his voice in the passage….
How I started; with what throbbing at the heart I leaped up and flung myself on his neck, without giving him time to take off his fur overcoat and unfasten his scarf! How greedily I gazed at him through bright, involuntary tears of tenderness! He had grown a little older during those seven years; lines, delicate as if they had been traced by a needle, furrowed his brow here and there, his cheeks were a little more hollow, and his hair was thinner; but he had hardly more beard, and his smile was just the same as ever; and his laugh, a soft, inward, as it were breathless laugh, was the same too….
Mercy on us! what didn’t we talk about that day! … The favourite poems we read to one another! I began begging him to move and come and live with me, but he would not consent. He promised, however, to come every day to see me, and he kept his word.
In soul, too, Pasinkov was unchanged. He showed himself just the same idealist as I had always known him. However rudely life’s chill, the bitter chill of experience, had closed in about him, the tender flower that had bloomed so early in my friend’s heart had kept all its pure beauty untouched. There was no trace of sadness even, no trace even of melancholy in him; he was quiet, as he had always been, but everlastingly glad at heart.
In Petersburg he lived as in a wilderness, not thinking of the future, and knowing scarcely any one. I took him to the Zlotnitskys’. He used to go and see them rather often. Not being self-conscious, he was not shy, but in their house, as everywhere, he said very little; they liked him, however. Even the tedious old man, Tatiana Vassilievna’s husband, was friendly to him, and both the silent girls were soon quite at home with him.
Sometimes he would arrive, bringing with him in the back pocket of his coat some book that had just come out, and for a long time would not make up his mind to read, but would keep stretching his neck out on one side, like a bird, looking about him as though inquiring, ‘could he?’ At last he would establish himself in a corner (he always liked sitting in corners), would pull out a book and set to reading, at first in a whisper, then louder and louder, occasionally interrupting himself with brief criticisms or exclamations. I noticed that Varvara was readier to sit by him and listen than her sister, though she certainly did not understand much; literature was not in her line. She would sit opposite Pasinkov, her chin in her hands, staring at him–not into his eyes, but into his whole face–and would not utter a syllable, but only heave a noisy, sudden sigh. Sometimes in the evenings we used to play forfeits, especially on Sundays and holidays. We were joined on these occasions by two plump, short young ladies, sisters, and distant relations of the Zlotnitskys, terribly given to giggling, and a few lads from the military school, very good-natured, quiet fellows. Pasinkov always used to sit beside Tatiana Vassilievna, and with her, judge what was to be done to the one who had to pay a forfeit.
Sophia did not like the kisses and such demonstrations, with which forfeits are often paid, while Varvara used to be cross if she had to look for anything or guess something. The young ladies giggled incessantly–laughter seemed to bubble up by some magic in them,–I sometimes felt positively irritated as I looked at them, but Pasinkov only smiled and shook his head. Old Zlotnitsky took no part in our games, and even looked at us rather disapprovingly from the door of his study. Only once, utterly unexpectedly, he came in to us, and proposed that whoever had next to pay a forfeit should waltz with him; we, of course, agreed. It happened to be Tatiana Vassilievna who had to pay the forfeit. She crimsoned all over, and was confused and abashed like a girl of fifteen; but her husband at once told Sophia to go to the piano, while he went up to his wife, and waltzed two rounds with her of the old-fashioned _trois temps_ waltz. I remember how his bilious, gloomy face, with its never-smiling eyes, kept appearing and disappearing as he slowly turned round, his stern expression never relaxing. He waltzed with a long step and a hop, while his wife pattered rapidly with her feet, and huddled up with her face close to his chest, as though she were in terror. He led her to her place, bowed to her, went back to his room and shut the door. Sophia was just getting up, but Varvara asked her to go on, went up to Pasinkov, and holding out her hand, with an awkward smile, said, ‘Will you like a turn?’ Pasinkov was surprised, but he jumped up–he was always distinguished by the most delicate courtesy–and took Varvara by the waist, but he slipped down at the first step, and leaving hold of his partner at once, rolled right under the pedestal on which the parrot’s cage was standing…. The cage fell, the parrot was frightened and shrieked, ‘Present arms!’ Every one laughed…. Zlotnitsky appeared at his study door, looked grimly at us, and slammed the door to. From that time forth, one had only to allude to this incident before Varvara, and she would go off into peals of laughter at once, and look at Pasinkov, as though anything cleverer than his behaviour on that occasion it was impossible to conceive.
Pasinkov was very fond of music. He used often to beg Sophia to play him something, and to sit on one side listening, and now and then humming in a thin voice the most pathetic passages. He was particularly fond of Schubert’s Constellation. He used to declare that when he heard the air played he could always fancy that with the sounds long rays of azure light came pouring down from on high, straight upon him. To this day, whenever I look upon a cloudless sky at night, with the softly quivering stars, I always recall Schubert’s melody and Pasinkov…. An excursion into the country comes back to my mind. We set out, a whole party of us, in two hired four-wheel carriages, to Pargolovo. I remember we took the carriages from the Vladimirsky; they were very old, and painted blue, with round springs, and a wide box-seat, and bundles of hay inside; the brown, broken-winded horses that drew us along at a slow trot were each lame in a different leg. We strolled a long while about the pinewoods round Pargolovo, drank milk out of earthenware pitchers, and ate wild strawberries and sugar. The weather was exquisite. Varvara did not care for long walks: she used soon to get tired; but this time she did not lag behind us. She took off her hat, her hair came down, her heavy features lighted up, and her cheeks were flushed. Meeting two peasant girls in the wood, she sat down suddenly on the ground, called them to her, did not patronise them, but made them sit down beside her. Sophia looked at them from some distance with a cold smile, and did not go up to them. She was walking with Asanov. Zlotnitsky observed that Varvara was a regular hen for sitting. Varvara got up and walked away. In the course of the walk she several times went up to Pasinkov, and said to him, ‘Yakov Ivanitch, I want to tell you something,’ but what she wanted to tell him–remained unknown.
But it’s high time for me to get back to my story.
* * * * *
I was glad to see Pasinkov; but when I recalled what I had done the day before, I felt unutterably ashamed, and I hurriedly turned away to the wall again. After a brief pause, Yakov asked me if I were unwell.
‘I’m quite well,’ I answered through my teeth; ‘only my head aches.’
Yakov made no reply, and took up a book. More than an hour passed by; I was just coming to the point of confessing everything to Yakov … suddenly there was a ring at the outer bell of my flat.
The door on to the stairs was opened…. I listened…. Asanov was asking my servant if I were at home.
Pasinkov got up; he did not care for Asanov, and telling me in a whisper that he would go and lie down on my bed, he went into my bedroom.
A minute later Asanov entered.
From the very sight of his flushed face, from his brief, cool bow, I guessed that he had not come to me without some set purpose in his mind. ‘What is going to happen?’ I wondered.
‘Sir,’ he began, quickly seating himself in an armchair, ‘I have come to you for you to settle a matter of doubt for me.’
‘And that is?’
‘That is: I wish to know whether you are an honest man.’
I flew into a rage. ‘What’s the meaning of that?’ I demanded.
‘I’ll tell you what’s the meaning of it,’ he retorted, underlining as it were each word. ‘Yesterday I showed you a pocket-book containing letters from a certain person to me…. To-day you repeated to that person, with reproach–with reproach, observe–some expressions from those letters, without having the slightest right to do so. I should like to know what explanation you can give of this?’
‘And I should like to know what right you have to cross-examine me,’ I answered, trembling with fury and inward shame.
‘You chose to boast of your uncle, of your correspondence; I’d nothing to do with it. You’ve got all your letters all right, haven’t you?’
‘The letters are all right; but I was yesterday in a condition in which you could easily—-‘
‘In short, sir,’ I began, speaking intentionally as loud as I could, ‘I beg you to leave me alone, do you hear? I don’t want to know anything about it, and I’m not going to give you any explanation. You can go to that person for explanations!’ I felt that my head was beginning to go round.
Asanov turned upon me a look to which he obviously tried to impart an air of scornful penetration, pulled his moustaches, and got up slowly.
‘I know now what to think,’ he observed; ‘your face is the best evidence against you. But I must tell you that that’s not the way honourable people behave…. To read a letter on the sly, and then to go and worry an honourable girl….’
‘Will you go to the devil!’ I shouted, stamping, ‘and send me a second; I don’t mean to talk to you.’
‘Kindly refrain from telling me what to do,’ Asanov retorted frigidly; ‘but I certainly will send a second to you.’
He went away. I fell on the sofa and hid my face in my hands. Some one touched me on the shoulder; I moved my hands–before me was standing Pasinkov.
‘What’s this? is it true?’ … he asked me. ‘You read another man’s letter?’
I had not the strength to answer, but I nodded in assent.
Pasinkov went to the window, and standing with his back to me, said slowly: ‘You read a letter from a girl to Asanov. Who was the girl?’
‘Sophia Zlotnitsky,’ I answered, as a prisoner on his trial answers the judge.
For a long while Pasinkov did not utter a word.
‘Nothing but passion could to some extent excuse you,’ he began at last. ‘Are you in love then with the younger Zlotnitsky?’
‘Yes.’
Pasinkov was silent again for a little.
‘I thought so. And you went to her to-day and began reproaching her?…’
‘Yes, yes, yes!…’ I articulated desperately. ‘Now you can despise me….’
Pasinkov walked a couple of times up and down the room.
‘And she loves him?’ he queried.
‘She loves him….’
Pasinkov looked down, and gazed a long while at the floor without moving.
‘Well, it must be set right,’ he began, raising his head,’ things can’t be left like this.’
And he took up his hat.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To Asanov.’
I jumped up from the sofa.
‘But I won’t let you. Good heavens! how can you! what will he think?’
Pasinkov looked at me.
‘Why, do you think it better to keep this folly up, to bring ruin on yourself, and disgrace on the girl?’
‘But what are you going to say to Asanov?’
‘I’ll try and explain things to him, I’ll tell him you beg his forgiveness …’
‘But I don’t want to apologise to him!’
‘You don’t? Why, aren’t you in fault?’
I looked at Pasinkov; the calm and severe, though mournful, expression of his face impressed me; it was new to me. I made no reply, and sat down on the sofa.
Pasinkov went out.
In what agonies of suspense I waited for his return! With what cruel slowness the time lingered by! At last he came back–late.
‘Well?’ I queried in a timid voice.
‘Thank goodness!’ he answered; ‘it’s all settled.’
‘You have been at Asanov’s?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, and he?–made a great to-do, I suppose?’ I articulated with an effort.
‘No, I can’t say that. I expected more … He … he’s not such a vulgar fellow as I thought.’
‘Well, and have you seen any one else besides?’ I asked, after a brief pause.
‘I’ve been at the Zlotnitskys’.’
‘Ah!…’ (My heart began to throb. I did not dare look Pasinkov in the face.) ‘Well, and she?’
‘Sophia Nikolaevna is a reasonable, kind-hearted girl…. Yes, she is a kind-hearted girl. She felt awkward at first, but she was soon at ease. But our whole conversation only lasted five minutes.’
‘And you … told her everything … about me … everything?’
‘I told her what was necessary.’
‘I shall never be able to go and see them again now!’ I pronounced dejectedly….
‘Why? No, you can go occasionally. On the contrary, you are absolutely bound to go and see them, so that nothing should be thought….’
‘Ah, Yakov, you will despise me now!’ I cried, hardly keeping back my tears.
‘Me! Despise you? …’ (His affectionate eyes glowed with love.) ‘Despise you … silly fellow! Don’t I see how hard it’s been for you, how you’re suffering?’
He held out his hand to me; I fell on his neck and broke into sobs.
After a few days, during which I noticed that Pasinkov was in very low spirits, I made up my mind at last to go to the Zlotnitskys’. What I felt, as I stepped into their drawing-room, it would be difficult to convey in words; I remember that I could hardly distinguish the persons in the room, and my voice failed me. Sophia was no less ill at ease; she obviously forced herself to address me, but her eyes avoided mine as mine did hers, and every movement she made, her whole being, expressed constraint, mingled … why conceal the truth? with secret aversion. I tried, as far as possible, to spare her and myself from such painful sensations. This meeting was happily our last–before her marriage. A sudden change in my fortunes carried me off to the other end of Russia, and I bade a long farewell to Petersburg, to the Zlotnitsky family, and, what was most grievous of all for me, to dear Yakov Pasinkov.
II
Seven years had passed by. I don’t think it necessary to relate all that happened to me during that period. I moved restlessly about over Russia, and made my way into the remotest wilds, and thank God I did! The wilds are not so much to be dreaded as some people suppose, and in the most hidden places, under the fallen twigs and rotting leaves in the very heart of the forest, spring up flowers of sweet fragrance.
One day in spring, as I was passing on some official duties through a small town in one of the outlying provinces of Eastern Russia, through the dim little window of my coach I saw standing before a shop in the square a man whose face struck me as exceedingly familiar. I looked attentively at the man, and to my great delight recognised him as Elisei, Pasinkov’s servant.
I at once told the driver to stop, jumped out of the coach, and went up to Elisei.
‘Hullo, friend!’ I began, with difficulty concealing my excitement; ‘are you here with your master?’
‘Yes, I’m with my master,’ he responded slowly, and then suddenly cried out: ‘Why, sir, is it you? I didn’t know you.’
‘Are you here with Yakov Ivanitch?’
‘Yes, sir, with him, to be sure … whom else would I be with?’
‘Take me to him quickly.’
‘To be sure! to be sure! This way, please, this way … we’re stopping here at the tavern.’ Elisei led me across the square, incessantly repeating–‘Well, now, won’t Yakov Ivanitch be pleased!’
This man, of Kalmuck extraction, and hideous, even savage appearance, but the kindest-hearted creature and by no means a fool, was passionately devoted to Pasinkov, and had been his servant for ten years.
‘Is Yakov Ivanitch quite well?’ I asked him.
Elisei turned his dusky, yellow little face to me.
‘Ah, sir, he’s in a poor way … in a poor way, sir! You won’t know his honour…. He’s not long for this world, I’m afraid. That’s how it is we’ve stopped here, or we had been going on to Odessa for his health.’
‘Where do you come from?’
‘From Siberia, sir.’
‘From Siberia?’
‘Yes, sir. Yakov Ivanitch was sent to a post out there. It was there his honour got his wound.’
‘Do you mean to say he went into the military service?’
‘Oh no, sir. He served in the civil service.’
‘What a strange thing!’ I thought.
Meanwhile we had reached the tavern, and Elisei ran on in front to announce me. During the first years of our separation, Pasinkov and I had written to each other pretty often, but his last letter had reached me four years before, and since then I had heard nothing of him.
‘Please come up, sir!’ Elisei shouted to me from the staircase; ‘Yakov Ivanitch is very anxious to see you.’
I ran hurriedly up the tottering stairs, went into a dark little room–and my heart sank…. On a narrow bed, under a fur cloak, pale as a corpse, lay Pasinkov, and he was stretching out to me a bare, wasted hand. I rushed up to him and embraced him passionately.
‘Yasha!’ I cried at last; ‘what’s wrong with you?’
‘Nothing,’ he answered in a faint voice; ‘I’m a bit feeble. What chance brought you here?’
I sat down on a chair beside Pasinkov’s bed, and, never letting his hands out of my hands, I began gazing into his face. I recognised the features I loved; the expression of the eyes and the smile were unchanged; but what a wreck illness had made of him!
He noticed the impression he was making on me.
‘It’s three days since I shaved,’ he observed; ‘and, to be sure, I’ve not been combed and brushed, but except for that … I’m not so bad.’
‘Tell me, please, Yasha,’ I began; ‘what’s this Elisei’s been telling me … you were wounded?’
‘Ah! yes, it’s quite a history,’ he replied. ‘I’ll tell you it later. Yes, I was wounded, and only fancy what by?–an arrow.’
‘An arrow?’
‘Yes, an arrow; only not a mythological one, not Cupid’s arrow, but a real arrow of very flexible wood, with a sharply-pointed tip at one end…. A very unpleasant sensation is produced by such an arrow, especially when it sticks in one’s lungs.’
‘But however did it come about? upon my word!…’
‘I’ll tell you how it happened. You know there always was a great deal of the absurd in my life. Do you remember my comical correspondence about getting my passport? Well, I was wounded in an absurd fashion too. And if you come to think of it, what self-respecting person in our enlightened century would permit himself to be wounded by an arrow? And not accidentally–observe–not at sports of any sort, but in a battle.’
‘But you still don’t tell me …’
‘All right, wait a minute,’ he interrupted. ‘You know that soon after you left Petersburg I was transferred to Novgorod. I was a good time at Novgorod, and I must own I was bored there, though even there I came across one creature….’ (He sighed.) … ‘But no matter about that now; two years ago I got a capital little berth, some way off, it’s true, in the Irkutsk province, but what of that! It seems as though my father and I were destined from birth to visit Siberia. A splendid country, Siberia! Rich, fertile–every one will tell you the same. I liked it very much there. The natives were put under my rule; they’re a harmless lot of people; but as my ill-luck would have it, they took it into their heads, a dozen of them, not more, to smuggle in contraband goods. I was sent to arrest them. Arrest them I did, but one of them, crazy he must have been, thought fit to defend himself, and treated me to the arrow…. I almost died of it; however, I got all right again. Now, here I am going to get completely cured…. The government–God give them all good health!–have provided the cash.’
Pasinkov let his head fall back on the pillow, exhausted, and ceased speaking. A faint flush suffused his cheeks. He closed his eyes.
‘He can’t talk much,’ Elisei, who had not left the room, murmured in an undertone.
A silence followed; nothing was heard but the sick man’s painful breathing.
‘But here,’ he went on, opening his eyes, ‘I’ve been stopping a fortnight in this little town…. I caught cold, I suppose. The district doctor here is attending me–you’ll see him; he seems to know his business. I’m awfully glad it happened so, though, or how should we have met?’ (And he took my hand. His hand, which had just before been cold as ice, was now burning hot.) ‘Tell me something about yourself,’ he began again, throwing the cloak back off his chest. ‘You and I haven’t seen each other since God knows when.’
I hastened to carry out his wish, so as not to let him talk, and started giving an account of myself. He listened to me at first with great attention, then asked for drink, and then began closing his eyes again and turning his head restlessly on the pillow. I advised him to have a little nap, adding that I should not go on further till he was well again, and that I should establish myself in a room beside him. ‘It’s very nasty here …’ Pasinkov was beginning, but I stopped his mouth, and went softly out. Elisei followed me.
‘What is it, Elisei? Why, he’s dying, isn’t he?’ I questioned the faithful servant.
Elisei simply made a gesture with his hand, and turned away.
Having dismissed my driver, and rapidly moved my things into the next room, I went to see whether Pasinkov was asleep. At the door I ran up against a tall man, very fat and heavily built. His face, pock-marked and puffy, expressed laziness–and nothing else; his tiny little eyes seemed, as it were, glued up, and his lips looked polished, as though he were just awake.
‘Allow me to ask,’ I questioned him, ‘are you not the doctor?’
The fat man looked at me, seeming with an effort to lift his overhanging forehead with his eyebrows.
‘Yes, sir,’ he responded at last.
‘Do me the favour, Mr. Doctor, won’t you, please, to come this way into my room? Yakov Ivanitch, is, I believe, now asleep. I am a friend of his and should like to have a little talk with you about his illness, which makes me very uneasy.’
‘Very good,’ answered the doctor, with an expression which seemed to try and say, ‘Why talk so much? I’d have come anyway,’ and he followed me.
‘Tell me, please,’ I began, as soon as he had dropped into a chair, ‘is my friend’s condition serious? What do you think?’
‘Yes,’ answered the fat man, tranquilly.
‘And…is it very serious?’
‘Yes, it’s serious.’
‘So that he may…even die?’
‘He may.’
I confess I looked almost with hatred at the fat man.
‘Good heavens!’ I began; ‘we must take some steps, call a consultation, or something. You know we can’t…Mercy on us!’
‘A consultation?–quite possible; why not? It’s possible. Call in Ivan Efremitch….’
The doctor spoke with difficulty, and sighed continually. His stomach heaved perceptibly when he spoke, as it were emphasising each word.
‘Who is Ivan Efremitch?’
‘The parish doctor.’
‘Shouldn’t we send to the chief town of the province? What do you think? There are sure to be good doctors there.’
‘Well! you might.’
‘And who is considered the best doctor there?’
‘The best? There was a doctor Kolrabus there … only I fancy he’s been transferred somewhere else. Though I must own there’s no need really to send.’
‘Why so?’
‘Even the best doctor will be of no use to your friend.’
‘Why, is he so bad?’
‘Yes, he’s run down.’ ‘In what way precisely is he ill?’
‘He received a wound…. The lungs were affected in consequence … and then he’s taken cold too, and fever was set up … and so on. And there’s no reserve force; a man can’t get on, you know yourself, with no reserve force.’
We were both silent for a while.
‘How about trying homoeopathy?…’ said the fat man, with a sidelong glance at me.
‘Homoeopathy? Why, you’re an allopath, aren’t you?’
‘What of that? Do you think I don’t understand homoeopathy? I understand it as well as the other! Why, the chemist here among us treats people homeopathically, and he has no learned degree whatever.’
‘Oh,’ I thought, ‘it’s a bad look-out!…’
‘No, doctor,’ I observed, ‘you had better treat him according to your usual method.’
‘As you please.’
The fat man got up and heaved a sigh.
‘You are going to him? ‘I asked.
‘Yes, I must have a look at him.’
And he went out.
I did not follow him; to see him at the bedside of my poor, sick friend was more than I could stand. I called my man and gave him orders to drive at once to the chief town of the province, to inquire there for the best doctor, and to bring him without fail. There was a slight noise in the passage. I opened the door quickly.
The doctor was already coming out of Pasinkov’s room.
‘Well?’ I questioned him in a whisper.
‘It’s all right. I have prescribed a mixture.’
‘I have decided, doctor, to send to the chief town. I have no doubt of your skill, but as you’re aware, two heads are better than one.’
‘Well, that’s very praiseworthy!’ responded the fat man, and he began to descend the staircase. He was obviously tired of me.
I went in to Pasinkov.
‘Have you seen the local Aesculapius?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I answered.
‘What I like about him,’ remarked Pasinkov, ‘is his astounding composure. A doctor ought to be phlegmatic, oughtn’t he? It’s so encouraging for the patient.’
I did not, of course, try to controvert this.
Towards the evening, Pasinkov, contrary to my expectations, seemed better. He asked Elisei to set the samovar, announced that he was going to regale me with tea, and drink a small cup himself, and he was noticeably more cheerful. I tried, though, not to let him talk, and seeing that he would not be quiet, I asked him if he would like me to read him something. ‘Just as at Winterkeller’s–do you remember?’ he answered. ‘If you will, I shall be delighted. What shall we read? Look, there are my books in the window.’…