The village. [Translation from the original Russian text by Isabel Hapgood] (10 page)

"Damp Mother-Earth is weeping heavily, is sobbing!"

sang the blind man.

"Is Wee-p-i-i-ng hea-vi-ly, is sob-bing!" Makarka repeated sharply, with conviction.

"Before the Saviour, before His image—"

roared the blind man.

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"Perchance the sinners will repent!"

threatened Makarka, inflating his insolent nostrils And merging his basso with the blind man's tenor, he articulated distinctly:

"They shall not escape God's judgment! They shall not escape the fires eternal!"

And suddenly he broke off—in accord with the blind man—cleared his throat, and simply, in his habitual insolent tone, demanded: "Give us a contribution, merchant, to warm us up." Thereupon, without waiting for a reply, he strode across the threshold, marched up to the bed, and thrust a small picture into Tikhon Hitch's hand.

It was a simple clipping from an illustrated journal, but, as he glanced at it, Tikhon Hitch felt a sudden pain in his lower breast. Beneath the picture, which depicted trees bending before the tempest, a white zigzag athwart the storm-cloud, and a falling man, was the inscription: "Jean-Paul Richter, killed by lightning."

And Tikhon Hitch was dumbfounded.

But he immediately recovered himself. "Akh, the scoundrel!" he said to himself, and he slowly tore the picture into tiny bits. Then he got out of bed and, drawing on his boots, said: "Go scare some one who is a bigger fool than I am. I know you well, you see, my good man! Here—take what's right, and—God be with you!" Then he went into the shop, carried out to Makarka, who was standing with the blind man

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near the porch, a couple of pounds of cracknels and a couple of herrings, and repeated once more, sternly: "The Lord be with you!"

"And how about some tobacco?" audaciously demanded Makarka.

"I have only a scant supply of it on hand for myself."

Makarka grinned.

"Correct!" said he. "That means—furnish your own tobacco, I'll give the paper—and let's have a smoke!"

"Behind the dram-shop in the town tobacco grows on the bushes," retorted Tikhon Hitch curtly. "You can't outdo me in foul language, my good man!" And, after a pause, he added: "Hanging's too good for you, Makarka, after the tricks you've played!"

Makarka surveyed the blind man, who was standing erect, firmly planted with brows elevated, and asked him: "Man of God, what ought we to do, think you? Strangle him or shoot him?"

"Shooting's surer," replied the blind man gravely. "At any rate, that's the most direct road."

XIX

IT was growing dark, the thick layers of clouds were turning blue and cold, and there was a touch of winter in the air. The mud was congealing. Having got rid of Makarka, Tikhon Hitch stamped his frost-bitten feet on the porch and entered the house.

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There, without removing his coat and cap, he seated himself on a chair near the little window, began to smoke, and again became immersed in thought. He recalled to mind the summer, the rebellion, the Bride, his brother, his wife—and that, so far, he had not paid off his farmhands for their season's work. It was his custom to delay payment. The young girls and children who came to him on daily wages stood for days on end at his threshold, complained of their extreme need, waxed angry, sometimes made insolent remarks. But he was inexorable. He shouted and called upon God to witness that he had only two coppers in his house. "Search and see if you can find any more!" —and he turned his pockets and his purse inside out and spat in feigned wrath, as though amazed by the distrust, the "dishonesty" of the suppliants. But now that custom seemed to him the opposite of good. He had been ruthlessly harsh with his wife, and cold, and so complete a stranger to her that, at times, he utterly forgot her existence. And now, all of a sudden, this astonished him: good God, why, he had not even the least idea what sort of person she was! If she were to die that day, he would not be able to say two words as to why she had lived, what she had thought, what she had felt throughout all the long years she had lived with him—those years which had merged themselves into a single year, and had flashed past in ceaseless cares and anxieties. And what had he to show for all those worries? He threw away his cigarette, and lighted a fresh one. Ugh, but that Makarka was a clever beast! and, once granted that he was clever,

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why wasn't it possible that he might be able to foresee things—when something was coming, and what it was, and to whom? Something abominable was, indubitably, awaiting him, Tikhon Hitch. For one thing, he was no longer a young man. How many of his contemporaries were in the other world! And from death and old age there is no escape! Not even children would have saved him. And he would not have known the children, and the children would have found him as much of a stranger as he had been to all those, alive or dead, who had been nearly connected with him. There were as many people on the earth as there are stars in the sky; but life is short, people come into being, grow up, and die so rapidly, are so slightly acquainted with one another, and so quickly forget all that has happened to them, that it is enough to drive a man crazy if he once sets about considering the matter attentively! Only quite recently he had said to himself: "My life ought to be written up. . . ." But what was there to write about? Nothing. Nothing at all, or nothing of any consequence. Why, he himself could recall scarcely anything of that life. For example, he had completely forgotten his childhood: once in a while, it is true, a fleeting memory would flash across his mind of some summer day, some incident, some playfellow. Once he had singed somebody's cat—and had been whipped for it. Some one had given him a little whip with a bird-call whistle in the handle, and it had made him indescribably happy. His drunken father had a special way of calling to him—caressingly, his voice laden with sadness:

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"Come to me, Tisha, come, dear lad!" Then, suddenly, he would grab him by the hair. . . .

If Ilya Mironoff, the huckster, had still been alive, Tikhon Hitch would have supported him out of kindness, and would have known nothing about him, and would barely have noticed his existence. It had been the same way with his mother. Ask him now: "Do you remember your mother?" and he would answer: "I remember some crooked old woman who dried the manure and kept the stove hot, tippled in secret, and grumbled." Nothing more. He had served nearly ten years with Matorin, but that decade had melted together into about a day or two: the fine April rain pattering down and speckling the sheets of iron which, rattling and clanging, were being loaded into a cart alongside the neighbouring shop; a grey, frosty noonday, the pigeons alighting in a noisy flock upon the snow beside the shop of another neighbour who dealt in flour, groats, and bran, crowding together, cooing and flapping their wings, while he and his brother whipped with an ox-tail a peg-top spinning on the threshold. Matorin was young, then, and robust, and purplish-red of complexion, with his chin cleanly shaven and sandy side-whiskers cut down to half-length. Now he was poor; he ambled about with the walk of an old man, his great-coat faded by the sun, and his capacious cap; ambled from shop to shop, from one acquaintance to another, played checkers, lounged in Daeff's eating-house, drank a little, got tipsy and loquacious: "We are pretty folks: we've drunk, and eaten, and paid our score—and off we go,

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home!" And, on encountering Tikhon Hitch, he did not immediately recognize him, but would smile woefully and say: "Is that really you, Tisha?"

And Tikhon Hitch himself had not recognized his own brother when first they met that autumn: "Can that be Kuzma, with whom I roamed for so many years about the fields, the villages, and the bye-lanes?"

("How old you have grown, brother!"

"I have, a bit."

"And how early!"

"That's because I'm a Russian. That happens quickly with us.")

And, great heavens, how everything had changed since the days when they had been roving peddlers! How dreadfully unlike was the present Tikhon Hitch to the half-gipsy huckster Tisha, swarthy as a black-beetle, reckless, and merry!

As he lighted his third cigarette, Tikhon Hitch stared fixedly and questioningly out of the tiny window:

"Can it be like this in other lands?"

No, it could not be the same. Men of his acquaintance had been abroad—there was merchant Rukavish-nikoff, for instance—and they had told him things. And even aside from RukavishnikofT, one could put things together. Take the Germans of the towns, or the Jews: all conduct themselves reasonably, are punctual, all know one another, all are friends —and that not alone in a state of intoxication —and all are mutually helpful: if they are separated, they write letters to one another all their lives long

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and exchange portraits of fathers, mothers, acquaintances from family to family; they teach their children, love them, walk with them, talk with them as with equals so that the child has something to remember. But with us, all are enemies of one another, every one envies and slanders every one else, goes to see acquaintances once a year, sits apart, each in his kennel; all bustle about like madmen when any one drops in for a visit, and dash around to put the rooms in order. But what's the truth of the matter? They begrudge the guest a spoonful of preserves! The guest will not drink a second cup of tea without being specially invited. Ugh, you slant-eyed Kirghizi! You yellow-haired Mordvinians! You savages!

Some one's troika-team drove past the windows. Tikhon Hitch scrutinized it attentively. The horses were emaciated but obviously mettlesome. The taran-tas was in good condition. Whose could it be? No one in the immediate neighbourhood owned such a troika. The neighbouring landed proprietors were so indignant that they sat for three days at a stretch without bread, had sold the last scrap of vestments from their holy pictures, had not a farthing wherewith to replace broken glass or mend the roof; instead they stuffed cushions into the window-frames and set bread-troughs and buckets all over the floor when rain came on—and it poured through the ceilings as through a sieve. Then Deniska the cobbler passed. Where was he going? And what was that he had with him? That couldn't be a valise he was carrying? Okh, there's a fool for you, forgive my sin, O Lord!

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M

XX

ECHANICALLY Tikhon Hitch threw his greatcoat on over his jacket, thrust his feet into overshoes, and went out on the porch. On emerging he inhaled a deep breath of fresh air in the bluish early winter twilight, then halted once mere and sat down on the bench. Yes, there was another nice family—the Grey Man, Syery, and his son! Tikhon Hitch traversed in thought the road which Deniska had traversed in the mud, with that valise in his hand. He descried Durnovka, his manor, the ravine, the peasant cottages, the descending twilight, the light in his brother's room, the lights among the peasant dwellings. Kuzma was probably sitting and reading. The Bride was standing in the dark, cold ante-room near the faintly-heated stove, warming her hands, her back, waiting until she should be told "Bring the supper!" and, with her dry lips, already grown old and pursed up, was thinking—of what? Perchance of Rodka? Twas a lie, all that about her having poisoned Rodka —a lie! But if she did poison him—

Oh, Lord God! If she did poison him, what must she be feeling? What a heavy tombstone lay upon her strange, reticent soul! And how had that come about upon which she had decided, crazed by hatred o f Rodka and of his brutal beatings—possibly, also, by her outraged feelings toward him, Tikhon Hitch, and

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her disgrace, and the fear that Rodka would eventually hear of that disgrace? Okh, and he had been in the habit of beating her! And Tikhon Hitch had played a fine part, too. And God would surely punish him, too.

With his mind's eye he cast a glance from the porch of his Durnovka manor house, at Durnovka—a rebel, also!—at the black cottages scattered over the declivity beyond the ravine, at the threshing floors and bushes in their back yards. Beyond the houses to the left, on the horizon, stood a railway watch-tower. Past it, in the twilight, a train was running, and with it ran a chain of fiery eyes. Then eyes began to shine out from the cottages. It grew darker; one began to feel more comfortable—yet a disagreeable sensation stirred every time one cast a glance at the cottages of the Bride and the Grey Man, which stood almost in the centre of Durnovka, separated only by three houses. There was no light in either of them. And it was that way nearly all winter long! The Grey Man's small children frolicked with joy and wonder when he managed, on some lucky evening, to burn a light in the cottage.

"Yes, 'tis sinful!" said Tikhon Hitch firmly, and rose from his seat. "Yes, 'tis wicked! I must give them at least a little help," he said, as he wended his way towards the station.

The air was frosty, and the odour of the samovar which was wafted from the station was more fragrant than it had been on the preceding day. The lights at the gate were burning more brightly beyond the trees, which had been smartly frost-bitten and were almost bare, tinted by a little scanty foliage.

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The sleighbells on the troika pealed more sonorously. A capital team of horses, those three! On the contrary, it was painful to look at the wretched nags of the peasant cabmen, their tiny vehicles mounted on half-crumbling, misshapen wheels, plastered with mud. The door to the railway station was squeaking and dully banging beyond the palisade. Making his way around it, Tikhon Hitch ascended the lofty stone platform, on which a copper samovar of a couple of buckets' capacity was hissing, its grating glowing red like fiery teeth; and immediately came upon the person of whom he was in search—that is, Deniska.

Deniska, his head bowed in thought, was standing on the platform and holding in his right hand a cheap grey valise, lavishly studded with tin nailheads and bound about with a rope. Deniska was wearing an under-jacket, an old and, evidently, a very heavy garment with pendant shoulders and a very low waist-line, a new peaked cap, and dilapidated boots. His figure was badly built; his legs were extremely short in comparison with his body: "I have nothing but a body," he sometimes said of himself, with a laugh. Now, with that low waist-line and those broken boots, his legs looked shorter than ever.

"Denis?" shouted Tikhon Hitch. "What are you doing here?"

Deniska, who was never surprised at anything, raised his dark and languid eyes with their long lashes, looked at him with a melancholy grin, and pulled the cap from his hair. His hair was mouse-coloured and immeasurably thick; his face was earthy in hue and

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bore the appearance of having been greased, but his eyes were handsome.

"Good Morning, Tikhon Hitch," he replied, in a sing-song citified tenor voice, and, as usual, rather shyly. "I'm going to—what d'ye call it?—to Tula."

"But why, if you permit me to ask?"

"Maybe some sort of a job will turn up there."

Tikhon Hitch surveyed him. In his hand was the valise; from the pocket of his long-skirted waistcoat protruded sundry little books in green and red covers, twisted into a roll. The waistcoat must belong to some one else. "You're no dandy to make an impression in Tula!"

Deniska also cast an appraising eye over himself.

"The waistcoat, you mean?" he inquired modestly. "Well, when I earn some money in Tula, I'll buy myself a hussar jacket. I did pretty well during the summer. I sold newspapers."

Tikhon Hitch nodded in the direction of the valise: "What's that contraption you have there?"

Deniska lowered his eyelashes. "I bought myself a volish, sir."

"Well, you can't possibly go about in a hussar jacket without a valise!" said Tikhon Hitch scoffingly. "And what's that you've got in your pocket?"

"Nothing much—just a lot of small stuff."

"Let me look at it."

Deniska set down his valise on the platform and pulled the little books out of his pocket. Tikhon Hitch took them and examined them attentively. There was the song-book "Marusya," "The Woman

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Debauchee," "An Innocent Young Girl in the Clutches of Violence," "Congratulatory Verses to Parents, Teachers, and Benefactors," "The Role—"

At this point Tikhon Hitch faltered, but Deniska, who was watching closely, briskly and modestly prompted him: "The Role of the Proletariat in Russia."

Tikhon Hitch shook his head. "Here's something new! Not a mouthful of food, but you buy yourself a valise and nasty little books. Truly, 'tis not for nothing that folks call you an agitator. They say you are constantly reviling the Tsar! Look out, brother!"

"Well, 'tis not so costly as buying an estate," replied Deniska, with a melancholy grin. "They are good little books. And I haven't touched the Tsar. They tell lies about me as if I were dead and couldn't defend myself. But I never had any such thing in my thoughts. Am I a lunatic?"

The door-pulley creaked, and the station watchman made his appearance—a discharged soldier, grey-haired, afflicted with a hoarse, whistling asthma—also the restaurant keeper, a fat man with puffy eyes and greasy hair.

"Step aside, Messrs. Merchants, let me get the samovar." Deniska stepped aside and again grasped the handle of his valise.

"You stole that somewhere, I suppose?" asked Tikhon Hitch, nodding towards the valise, and thinking of the business upon which he had come to the station.

Deniska bent his head but made no reply.

"And it's empty, of course?"

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Deniska broke into a laugh.

"Yes, it's empty."

"Were you turned out of your place?"

"I left of my own accord."

Tikhon Hitch heaved a sigh. "The living image of his father!" said he. "That one was always exactly like that: Pitch him out of a place by the scruff of his neck, and he'd tell you—'I left of my own accord.' "

"May I drop dead right before your eyes if I'm lying."

"Well, all right, all right. Have you been at home?"

"Yes, two weeks."

"Is your father out of work again?"

"Yes, he is out of work naow."

"Naow!" Tikhon Hitch mimicked him. "A wooden-headed village! And a revolutionary to boot! You're trying to play the wolf, but your dog's tail betrays you."

"I rather think you come from the same litter," Deniska said to himself, with a faint grin, keeping his head down.

"That means, the Grey Man is sitting at home smoking?"

"He's a worthless fellow!" said Deniska with conviction.

Tikhon Hitch rapped him on the head with his knuckles. "You might, at least, not exhibit your stupidity! Who speaks of his father like that?"

"He ought to be called an old dog, not a daddy," replied Deniska calmly. "If he's a father—then let

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him provide food. But he has fed me heartily, hasn't he?"

But Tikhon Hitch was not listening to him. He chose a suitable moment for beginning a business-like talk. And, paying no heed to him, he interrupted: "Well, you've turned out an empty-headed babbler. Has YakofT sold the mare?"

Deniska suddenly broke out into a coarse, vociferous guffaw. But he replied in the same sing-song tenor voice as usual: "YakofT Mikititch, you mean? What are you talking about? He's getting richer and richer, and stingier and stingier. There was a great joke on him yesterday!"

"What about?"

"Why, there was! His colt died, and what sort of a trick did he concoct? He made use of its legs and hoofs. He hadn't enough stakes for his wattled fence, so—he took and wove in those same legs."

"He's fit for a cabinet-minister, not a peasant!" said Tikhon Hitch. "You tatterdemalions are not in the same class with him. I suppose you are travelling to Tula on a wolf's ticket?"

"And what should I want of a ticket?" retorted Deniska. "I get into the carriage and dive straight under the seat—and may the Lord bless and protect! All I want is to get to Uzlovskaya."

"What's that? Uzlovskaya? Do you mean Uz-slova?"

"Well, then, Uzslova; it's the same thing. I'll ride there, and from there on 'tis not far—I can go afoot."

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"And what were you thinking about doing with all your little books? You can't read them under the seat."

Deniska thought that over. "Right you are!" said he. "Well, I won't stay under the bench all the time. I'll creep into the toilet—I can read there until daylight."

Tikhon Hitch frowned. "Well, see here now," he began. "See here: 'tis time for you to stop that sort of talk. You're not a small boy, you fool. Trot back as fast as you can to Durnovka, Tis time to buckle down to business. Why, as you are, it makes one sick at the stomach just to look at you. My courtyard-councillors there live better than you do. I'll help you—that's got to be done—at the start. Well, I'll help you to get some simple merchandise and implements. Then you'll be able to feed yourself and give a little to your father."

"What's he driving at with all this?" Deniska said to himself.

But Tikhon I Hitch had come to a decision, and wound up: "Yes, and 'tis time you married."

"So—oo, that's it!" said Deniska to himself, and began in a leisurely way to roll himself a cigarette.

"Very good," he responded, with a barely perceptible trace of sadness, and without raising his eyelashes. "I'll not resist. I might marry. 'Tis worse to go with the public women."

"Well, and that's precisely the point," put in Tikhon Hitch, perturbed. "Only, brother, bear in mind that you must make a sensible marriage. 'Tis a good

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thing to have money on which to rear your children."

Deniska burst out laughing.

"What are you guffawing about?"

"Why, what you say, of course! Rear! As though they were chickens or pigs."