“I beg your pardon! There are people who look out for disorder. That’s why we have the constable, the headman, the militiaman…”
“A constable can’t look out for everything, and a constable doesn’t understand what I understand…”
“But don’t you see that it’s none of your business?”
“What’s that, sir? How is it not mine? Strange, sir…People behave outrageously and it’s none of my business! Should I praise them, then, or what? So they complain to you that I forbid singing songs…What’s the good of songs? Instead of taking up some kind of work, they sing songs…and they’ve also made it a fashion to sit in the evening with candles burning. They should go to bed, but they’re talking and laughing. I’ve got it written down, sir!”
“What have you got written down?”
“Who sits with candles burning.”
Whompov pulls a greasy scrap of paper from his pocket, puts on his spectacles, and reads:
“Peasants who sit with candles burning: Ivan Prokhorov, Savva Mikiforov, Pyotr Petrov. The soldier’s widow Shrustrova lives in depraved lawlessness with Semyon Kislov. Ignat Sverchok is taken up with magic and his wife Mavra is a witch, who goes by night to milk other people’s cows.”
“Enough!” says the justice, and he starts to interrogate the witnesses.
Corporal Whompov raises his spectacles on his brow and looks in astonishment at the justice, who is obviously not on his side. His popping eyes flash, his nose turns bright red. He stares at the justice, at the witnesses, and simply cannot understand what makes this justice so flustered, and why whispering and restrained laughter are heard from all corners of the courtroom. He also cannot understand the sentence: a month in jail!
“What for?!” he says, spreading his arms in bewilderment. “By what law?”
And it is clear to him that the world has changed and that living in it is no longer possible. Gloomy, dismal thoughts come over him. But, leaving the courtroom and seeing the peasants crowding around and talking about something, he, by force of a habit he can no longer control, stands at attention and shouts in a hoarse, angry voice:
“Brea-a-ak it up! Don’t cr-r-rowd around! Go home!”
1885
GRIEF
THE WOODTURNER Grigori Petrov, long known as an excellent craftsman and at the same time as the most good-for-nothing peasant in the whole Galchinsky district, is taking his sick old wife to the local hospital. He has to drive some twenty miles, and moreover the road is terrible, hard enough for a government postman to deal with, not to mention such a lazybones as the woodturner Grigori. A sharp, cold wind blows right in his face. In the air, wherever you look, big clouds of snowflakes whirl, so that it is hard to tell whether the snow is coming from the sky or from the earth. Neither the fields, nor the telegraph poles, nor the forest can be seen through the snowy mist, and when an especially strong gust of wind hits Grigori, he cannot even see the shaft bow. The decrepit, feeble little nag barely trudges along. All her energy is spent on pulling her legs out of the deep snow and tossing her head. The woodturner is in a hurry. He fidgets restlessly on the box and keeps whipping the horse’s back.
“Don’t you cry, Matryona…,” he mutters. “Hold out a little longer. God grant we’ll get to the hospital, and in a flash you’ll be, sort of…Pavel Ivanych will give you some little drops, or order a blood-letting, or maybe he’ll be so kind as to rub you with some sort of spirits, and that will…ease your side. Pavel Ivanych will do his best. He’ll scold, stamp his feet, but he’ll do his best…He’s a nice gentleman, well-mannered, God grant him good health…
“As soon as we get there, he’ll come running out of his quarters and start calling up all the devils. ‘What? How’s this?’ he’ll shout. ‘Why don’t you come at the right time? Am I some sort of dog, to bother with you devils all day long? Why didn’t you come in the morning? Out! So there’s no trace of you left! Come tomorrow!’ And I’ll say: ‘Doctor, sir! Pavel Ivanych! Your Honor!’ Get a move on, devil take you! Hup!”
The woodturner whips his nag and, not looking at the old woman, goes on muttering under his breath:
“ ‘Your Honor! Truly, as before God himself…I swear, I set out at daybreak. How could I make it here on time, if the Lord…the Mother of God…turned wrathful and sent such a storm? Kindly see for yourself…A nobler horse wouldn’t even have made it, and mine, kindly see for yourself, isn’t a horse, it’s a disgrace!’ Pavel Ivanych will frown and shout: ‘We know your kind! You always find some excuse! Especially you, Grishka! I’ve known you a long time! No doubt you stopped off maybe five times at a pot-house!’ And I say to him: ‘Your Honor! What am I, some sort of villain or heathen? The old woman’s rendering up her soul to God, she’s dying, and I should go running around to the pot-houses? Mercy, how can you? Let them all perish, these pot-houses!’ Then Pavel Ivanych will have you carried into the hospital. And I’ll bow down to him…‘Pavel Ivanych! Your Honor! I humbly thank you! Forgive us, cursed fools that we are, don’t take offense at us peasants! You should have kicked us out, but you kindly went to the trouble and got your feet covered with snow!’ And Pavel Ivanych will glance at me as if he’s about to hit me and say: ‘Instead of bowing at my feet, you’d do better, you fool, to stop guzzling vodka and pity your old woman. You could use a good whipping!’ ‘Exactly so, Pavel Ivanych, a good whipping, God strike me dead, a good whipping! And how can I not bow at your feet, if you’re our benefactor and dear father? Your Honor! I give you my word…as if before God…spit in my face if I’m lying: as soon as my Matryona here recovers and is her old self again, anything Your Grace cares to order from me, I’ll be glad to make! A cigar box of Karelian birch, if you wish…croquet balls, I can turn bowling pins just like the foreign ones…I’ll do it all for you! I won’t take a kopeck for it! In Moscow a cigar box like that would cost you four roubles, but I won’t take a kopeck.’ The doctor will laugh and say: ‘Well, all right, all right…I get it! Only it’s too bad you’re a drunkard…’ I know, old girl, how to talk with gentlemen. There’s no gentleman I couldn’t talk with. Only God keep us from losing our way. What a blizzard! My eyes are all snowy.”
And the woodturner mutters endlessly. He babbles away mechanically, so as to stifle his heavy feeling if only a little. He has many words on his tongue, but there are still more thoughts and questions in his head. Grief has come suddenly, unexpectedly, and taken the woodturner by surprise, and now he cannot recover, come to his senses, figure things out. Up to then he had lived serenely, as if in a drunken half-consciousness, knowing neither grief nor joy, and now he suddenly feels a terrible pain in his soul. The carefree lazybones and tippler finds himself all at once in the position of a busy man, preoccupied, hurrying, and even struggling with the elements.
The woodturner remembers that the grief began the previous evening. When he came home the previous evening, a bit drunk as usual, and from inveterate habit began cursing and shaking his fists, the old woman glanced at her ruffian as she had never done before. Usually the expression of her old-woman’s eyes was martyred, meek, as with dogs that are much beaten and poorly fed, but now she looked at him sternly and fixedly, as saints on icons or dying people do. It was with those strange, unhappy eyes that the grief began. The dazed woodturner persuaded a neighbor to lend him a horse, and he was now taking his old wife to the hospital, hoping that Pavel Ivanych, with his powders and ointments, would restore the old woman’s former gaze.