“There it is, lying! That’s what it does, lying does.”
The plays fascinated him, both from their subjects and their moral, and from their skillful, complex construction, and he marveled at “him,” never calling the author by his name. How neatly he has put it all together.
This time my sister read softly only one page and could read no more: her voice would not last out. Radish took her hand and, moving his parched lips, said, hardly audibly, in a husky voice:
“The soul of a righteous man is white and smooth as chalk, but the soul of a sinful man is like pumice stone. The soul of a righteous man is like clear oil, but the soul of a sinful man is gas tar. We must labor, we must sorrow, we must suffer sickness,” he went on, “and he who does not labor and sorrow will not gain the Kingdom of Heaven. Woe, woe to them that are well fed, woe to the mighty, woe to the rich, woe to the moneylenders! Not for them is the Kingdom of Heaven. Lice eat grass, rust eats iron . . .”
“And lying the soul,” my sister added laughing.
I read the letter through once more. At that moment there walked into the kitchen a soldier who had been bringing us twice a week parcels of tea, French bread, and game, which smelled of scent, from some unknown giver. I had no work. I had had to sit at home idle for whole days together, and probably whoever sent us the French bread knew that we were in want.
I heard my sister talking to the soldier and laughing gaily. Then, lying down, she ate some French bread and said to me:
“When you wouldn’t go into the service, but became a house painter, Anyuta Blagovo and I knew from the beginning that you were right, but we were frightened to say so aloud. Tell me what force is it that hinders us from saying what one thinks? Take Anyuta Blagovo now, for instance. She loves you, she adores you, she knows you are right, she loves me too, like a sister, and knows that I am right, and I daresay in her soul envies me, but some force prevents her from coming to see us, she shuns us, she is afraid.”
My sister crossed her arms over her breast, and said passionately:
“How she loves you, if only you knew! She has confessed her love to no one but me, and then very secretly in the dark. She led me into a dark avenue in the garden and began whispering how precious you were to her. You will see, she’ll never marry, because she loves you. Are you sorry for her?”
“Yes.”
“It’s she who has sent the bread. She is absurd really, what is the use of being so secret? I used to be absurd and foolish, but now I have got away from that and am afraid of nobody. I think and say aloud what I like and am happy. When I lived at home I hadn’t a conception of happiness, and now I wouldn’t change with a queen.”
Dr. Blagovo arrived. He had taken his doctor’s degree, and was now staying in our town with his father; he was taking a rest, and said that he would soon go back to Petersburg again. He wanted to study anti-toxins against typhus, and, I believe, cholera; he wanted to go abroad to perfect his training, and then to be appointed a professor. He had already left the army service, and wore a roomy serge reefer jacket, very full trousers, and magnificent neckties. My sister was in ecstasies over his scarf pin, his studs, and the red silk handkerchief which he wore, I suppose from foppishness, sticking out of the breast pocket of his jacket. One day, having nothing to do, she and I counted up all the suits we remembered him wearing, and came to the conclusion that he had at least ten. It was clear that he still loved my sister as before, but he never once even in jest spoke of taking her with him to Petersburg or abroad, and I could not picture to myself clearly what would become of her if she remained alive and what would become of her child. She did nothing but dream endlessly and never thought seriously of the future; she said he might go where he liked and might abandon her even, so long as he was happy himself; that what had been was enough for her.
As a rule he used to sound her very carefully on his arrival and used to insist on her taking milk and drops in his presence. It was the same on this occasion. He sounded her and made her drink a glass of milk, and there was a smell of creosote in our room afterwards.
“That’s a good girl,” he said, taking the glass from her. “You mustn’t talk too much now; you’ve taken to chattering like a magpie of late. Please hold your tongue.”
She laughed. Then he came into Radish’s room where I was sitting and affectionately slapped me on the shoulder.
“Well, how goes it, old man?” he said, bending down to the invalid.
“Your honor,” said Radish, moving his lips slowly, “your honor, I venture to submit. . . . We all walk in the fear of God, we all have to die. . . . Permit me to tell you the truth. . . . Your honor, the Kingdom of Heaven will not be for you!”
“There’s no help for it,” the doctor said jestingly; “there must be somebody in hell, you know.”
And all at once something happened with my consciousness; as though I were in a dream, as though I were standing on a winter night in the slaughterhouse yard, and Prokofy beside me, smelling of pepper cordial; I made an effort to control myself, and rubbed my eyes, and at once it seemed to me that I was going along the road to the interview with the governor. Nothing of the sort had happened to me before, or has happened to me since, and these strange memories that were like dreams I ascribed to overexhaustion of my nerves. I lived through the scene at the slaughterhouse, and the interview with the governor, and at the same time was dimly aware that it was not real.
When I came to myself I saw that I was no longer in the house, but in the street, and was standing with the doctor near a lamppost.
“It’s sad, it’s sad,” he was saying, and tears were trickling down his cheeks. “She is in good spirits, she’s always laughing and hopeful, but her position’s hopeless, dear boy. Your Radish hates me and is always trying to make me feel that I have treated her badly. He is right from his standpoint, but I have my point of view too; and I shall never regret all that has happened. One must love; we ought all to love—oughtn’t we? There would be no life without love; anyone who fears and avoids love is not free.”
Little by little he passed to other subjects, began talking of science, of his dissertation which had been liked in Petersburg.
He was carried away by his subject, and no longer thought of my sister, nor of his grief, nor of me. Life was of absorbing interest to him. She has America and her ring with the inscription on it, I thought, while this fellow has his doctor’s degree and a professor’s chair to look forward to, and only my sister and I are left with the old things.
When I said good-bye to him, I went up to the lamppost and read the letter once more. And I remembered, I remembered vividly how that spring morning she had come to me at the mill, lain down and covered herself with her jacket—she wanted to be like a simple peasant woman. And how, another time—it was in the morning also—we drew the net out of the water, and heavy drops of rain fell upon us from the riverside willows, and we laughed. . . .
It was dark in our house in Great Dvoryansky Street. I got over the fence and, as I used to do in the old days, went by the back way to the kitchen to borrow a lantern. There was no one in the kitchen. The samovar hissed near the stove, waiting for my father. “Who pours out my father’s tea now?” I thought. Taking the lantern I went out to the shed, built myself up a bed of old newspapers and lay down. The hooks on the walls looked forbidding, as they used to of old, and their shadows flickered. It was cold. I felt that my sister would come in in a minute and bring me supper, but at once I remembered that she was ill and was lying at Radish’s, and it seemed to me strange that I should have climbed over the fence and be lying here in this unheated shed. My mind was in a maze, and I saw all sorts of absurd things.
There was a ring. A ring familiar from childhood: first the wire rustled against the wall, then a short plaintive ring in the kitchen. It was my father come back from the club. I got up and went into the kitchen. Axinya, the cook, clasped her hands on seeing me and for some reason burst into tears.
“My own!” she said sof
tly. “My precious! O Lord!”
And she began crumpling up her apron in her agitation. In the window there were standing jars of berries in vodka. I poured myself out a teacupful and greedily drank it off, for I was intensely thirsty. Axinya had quite recently scrubbed the table and benches, and there was that smell in the kitchen which is found in bright, snug kitchens kept by tidy cooks. And that smell and the chirp of the cricket used to lure us as children into the kitchen and put us in the mood for hearing fairy tales and playing at “kings.”
“Where’s Kleopatra?” Axinya asked softly, in a fluster, holding her breath; “and where is your cap, my dear? Your wife, you say, has gone to Petersburg?”
She had been our servant in our mother’s time and used once to give Kleopatra and me our baths, and to her we were still children who had to be talked to for their good. For a quarter of an hour or so she laid before me all the reflections which she had with the sagacity of an old servant been accumulating in the stillness of that kitchen, all the time since we had seen each other. She said that the doctor could be forced to marry Kleopatra; he only needed to be thoroughly frightened; and that if an appeal were promptly written the bishop would annul the first marriage; that it would be a good thing for me to sell Dubechnya without my wife’s knowledge and put the money in the bank in my own name; that if my sister and I were to bow down at my father’s feet and ask him properly, he might perhaps forgive us; that we ought to have a service sung to the Queen of Heaven. . . .
“Come, go along, my dear, and speak to him,” she said, when she heard my father’s cough. “Go along, speak to him; bow down, your head won’t drop off.”
I went in. My father was sitting at the table sketching a plan of a summer villa, with Gothic windows, and with a fat turret like a fireman’s watchtower—something peculiarly stiff and tasteless. Going into the study I stood still where I could see his drawing. I did not know why I had gone in to my father, but I remember that when I saw his lean face, his red neck, and his shadow on the wall, I wanted to throw myself on his neck, and as Axinya had told me, bow down at his feet; but the sight of the summer villa with the Gothic windows, and the fat turret, restrained me.
“Good evening,” I said.
He glanced at me and at once dropped his eyes to his drawing.
“What do you want?” he asked, after waiting a little.
“I have come to tell you my sister’s very ill. She can’t live very long,” I added in a hollow voice.
“Well,” sighed my father, taking off his spectacles and laying them on the table. “What thou sowest that shalt thou reap. What thou sowest,” he repeated, getting up from the table, “that shalt thou reap. I ask you to remember how you came to me two years ago, and on this very spot I begged you, I besought you to give up your errors; I reminded you of your duty, of your honor, of what you owed to your forefathers whose traditions we ought to preserve as sacred. Did you obey me? You scorned my counsels and obstinately persisted in clinging to your false ideals; worse still you drew your sister into the path of error with you and led her to lose her moral principles and sense of shame. Now you are both in a bad way. Well, as thou sowest, so shalt thou reap!”
As he said this he walked up and down the room. He probably imagined that I had come to him to confess my wrong doings, and he probably expected that I should begin begging him to forgive my sister and me. I was cold, I was shivering as though I were in a fever and spoke with difficulty in a husky voice.
“And I beg you, too, to remember,” I said, “on this very spot I besought you to understand me, to reflect, to decide with me how and for what we should live, and in answer you began talking about our forefathers, about my grandfather who wrote poems. One tells you now that your only daughter is hopelessly ill, and you go on again about your forefathers, your traditions. . . . And such frivolity in your old age, when death is close at hand, and you haven’t more than five or ten years left!”
“What have you come here for?” my father asked sternly, evidently offended at my reproaching him for his frivolity.
“I don’t know. I love you, I am unutterably sorry that we are so far apart—so you see I have come. I love you still, but my sister has broken with you completely. She does not forgive you and will never forgive you now. Your very name arouses her aversion for the past, for life.”
“And who is to blame for it?” cried my father. “It’s your fault, you scoundrel!”
“Well, suppose it is my fault,” I said. “I admit I have been to blame in many things, but why is it that this life of yours, which you think binding upon us, too—why is it so dreary, so barren? How is it that in not one of these houses you have been building for the last thirty years has there been anyone from whom I might have learned how to live, so as not to be to blame? There is not one honest man in the whole town! These houses of yours are nests of damnation, where mothers and daughters are made away with, where children are tortured. . . . My poor mother!” I went on in despair. “My poor sister! One has to stupefy oneself with vodka, with cards, with scandal; one must become a scoundrel, a hypocrite, or go on drawing plans for years and years, so as not to notice all the horrors that lie hidden in these houses. Our town has existed for hundreds of years, and all that time it has not produced one man of service to our country—not one. You have stifled in the germ everything in the least living and bright. It’s a town of shopkeepers, publicans, countinghouse clerks, canting hypocrites; it’s a useless, unnecessary town, which not one soul would regret if it suddenly sank through the earth.”
“I don’t want to listen to you, you scoundrel!” said my father, and he took up his ruler from the table. “You are drunk. Don’t dare come and see your father in such a state! I tell you for the last time, and you can repeat it to your depraved sister, that you’ll get nothing from me, either of you. I have torn my disobedient children out of my heart, and if they suffer for their disobedience and obstinacy I do not pity them. You can go whence you came. It has pleased God to chastise me with you, but I will bear the trial with resignation, and, like Job, I will find consolation in my sufferings and in unremitting labor. You must not cross my threshold till you have mended your ways. I am a just man, all I tell you is for your benefit, and if you desire your own good you ought to remember all your life what I say and have said to you. . . .”
I waved my hand in despair and went away. I don’t remember what happened afterwards, that night and next day.
I am told that I walked about the streets bareheaded, staggering, and singing aloud, while a crowd of boys ran after me, shouting:
“Better-than-nothing!”
20.
If I wanted to order a ring for myself, the inscription I should choose would be: “Nothing passes away.” I believe that nothing passes away without leaving a trace, and that every step we take, however small, has significance for our present and our future existence.
What I have been through has not been for nothing. My great troubles, my patience, have touched people’s hearts, and now they don’t call me “Better-than-nothing,” they don’t laugh at me, and when I walk by the shops they don’t throw water over me. They have grown used to my being a workman, and see nothing strange in my carrying a pail of paint and putting in windows, though I am of noble rank; on the contrary, people are glad to give me orders, and I am now considered a first-rate workman, and the best foreman after Radish, who, though he has regained his health, and though, as before, he paints the cupola on the belfry without scaffolding, has no longer the force to control the workmen; instead of him I now run about the town looking for work, I engage the workmen and pay them, borrow money at a high rate of interest, and now that I myself am a contractor, I understand how it is that one may have to waste three days racing about the town in search of tilers on account of some twopenny-halfpenny job. People are civil to me, they address me politely, and in the houses where I work they offer me tea and send to inquire whether I wouldn’t like dinner. Children and young girls often come
and look at me with curiosity and compassion.
One day I was working in the governor’s garden, painting an arbor there to look like marble. The governor, walking in the garden, came up to the arbor and, having nothing to do, entered into conversation with me, and I reminded him how he had once summoned me to an interview with him. He looked into my face intently for a minute, then made his mouth like a round “O,” flung up his hands, and said: “I don’t remember!”
I have grown older, have become silent, stern, and austere; I rarely laugh, and I am told that I have grown like Radish, and that like him I bore the workmen by my useless exhortations.
Marya Viktorovna, my former wife, is living now abroad, while her father is constructing a railway somewhere in the eastern provinces, and is buying estates there. Dr. Blagovo is also abroad. Dubechnya has passed again into the possession of Madam Cheprakov, who has bought it after forcing the engineer to knock the price down twenty percent. Moisei goes about now in a bowler hat; he often drives into the town in a racing droshky on business of some sort and stops near the bank. They say he has already bought up a mortgaged estate and is constantly making inquiries at the bank about Dubechnya, which he means to buy too. Poor Ivan Cheprakov was for a long while out of work, staggering about the town and drinking. I tried to get him into our work, and for a time he painted roofs and put in windowpanes in our company, and even got to like it, and stole oil, asked for tips, and drank like a regular painter. But he soon got sick of the work and went back to Dubechnya, and afterwards the workmen confessed to me that he had tried to persuade them to join him one night and murder Moisei and rob Madam Cheprakov.
My father has greatly aged; he is very bent, and in the evenings walks up and down near his house. I never go to see him.
During an epidemic of cholera Prokofy doctored some of the shopkeepers with pepper cordial and pitch, and took money for doing so, and, as I learned from the newspapers, was flogged for abusing the doctors as he sat in his shop. His shop-boy Nikolka died of cholera. Karpovna is still alive and, as always, she loves and fears her Prokofy. When she sees me, she always shakes her head mournfully, and says with a sigh: “Your life is ruined.”