“Come on, merchant’s wife, treat us!” Sergei kept rubbing it in.
“Ah, you’ve got no conscience!” said Fiona, shaking her head reproachfully.
“That does you no credit at all,” the prisoner Gordyushka seconded the soldier’s wife.
“If you’re not ashamed before her, you should be before others.”
“You common snuffbox!” Sergei yelled at Fiona. “Ashamed, is it! What should I be ashamed of! Maybe I never loved her, and now … Sonetka’s worn-out shoe is dearer to me than her mangy cat’s mug; what do you say to that? Let her love skew-mouthed Gordyushka; or—” he glanced at a runty fellow on horseback in a felt cape and military cap with a cockade and added, “or, better still, let her cuddle up to this transport officer: at least his cape will keep her from the rain.”
“And she’ll be called an officer’s wife,” Sonetka chimed in.
“Right you are! … and she’ll easily get enough to buy stockings,” Sergei seconded.
Katerina Lvovna did not defend herself: she looked more and more intently into the waves and moved her lips. Through Sergei’s vile talk she heard the rumble and moan from the opening and slamming waves. And suddenly the blue head of Boris Timofeich appears to her out of one breaking wave; her husband, rocking, peers out of another, holding Fedya with a drooping head. Katerina Lvovna wants to remember a prayer, and she moves her lips, but her lips whisper: “What a good time you and I had, sitting together of a long autumn evening, sending people out of this world by a cruel death.”
Katerina Lvovna was trembling. Her roving gaze became fixed and wild. Her arms reached out somewhere into space once or twice and dropped again. Another moment—and she suddenly began to sway all over, not taking her eyes from the dark waves, bent down, seized Sonetka by the legs, and in one sweep threw the girl and herself overboard.
Everyone was petrified with amazement.
Katerina Lvovna appeared at the top of a wave and sank again; another wave tossed up Sonetka.
“A hook! Throw them a hook!” they shouted on the ferry.
A heavy hook on a long rope soared up and fell into the water. Sonetka could no longer be seen. Two seconds later, borne away from the ferry by the swift current, she again flailed her arms; but at the same moment, out of another wave, Katerina Lvovna rose up almost to the waist, threw herself on Sonetka like a strong pike on a soft-finned little roach, and neither of them appeared again.
The Sealed Angel
I
It happened during Christmastime, on the eve of St. Basil’s.1 The weather was raging most unmercifully. A severe, ground-sweeping blizzard, of the kind for which the winters of the Transvolga steppe are famous, drove a multitude of people into a solitary inn that stood like an old bachelor in the midst of the flat and boundless steppe. Here gentlefolk, merchants, and peasants, Russians, and Mordovians, and Chuvashes, all ended up in one heap. To observe grades and ranks in such night lodgings was impossible: wherever you turned, it was crowded, some drying off, others warming themselves, still others looking for a bit of space to huddle up in; the dark, low cottage, crammed with people, was stuffy and filled with dense steam from the wet clothes. There was no free space to be seen: on the bunks, on the stove,2 on the benches, and even on the dirty earth floor—people were lying everywhere. The innkeeper, a stern muzhik, was glad neither of the guests nor of the gains. Angrily slamming the gate after the last sleigh, carrying two merchants, forced its way in, he locked it with a padlock and, hanging the key in the icon corner, said firmly:
“Well, now whoever wants to can beat his head on the gate—I won’t open.”
But he had barely managed to say that and, having taken off his vast sheepskin coat, to cross himself with a big, old-style cross and prepare to get onto the hot stove, when someone’s timid hand knocked on the windowpane.
“Who’s there?” the innkeeper called in a loud and displeased voice.
“It’s us,” a muffled reply came from outside the window.
“Well, what do you want?”
“Let us in, for Christ’s sake, we’re lost … frozen.”
“Are there many of you?”
“Not many, not many, eighteen in all, just eighteen,” a man, obviously completely frozen, said outside the window, stammering and his teeth chattering.
“There’s no room for you, the whole cottage is packed with people as it is.”
“At least let us warm up a little!”
“What are you?”
“Carters.”
“Empty or loaded?”
“Loaded, dear brother, we’re carrying hides.”
“Hides! You’re carrying hides, and you ask to spend the night in the cottage? What’s become of the Russian people! Get out of here!”
“But what are they to do?” asked a traveler lying under a bearskin coat on an upper bunk.
“Pile up the hides and sleep under them, that’s what,” the innkeeper replied, and, giving the carters another good cursing out, he lay motionless on the stove.
From under his bearskin, the traveler reprimanded the innkeeper for his cruelty in tones of highly energetic protest, but the man did not honor his remarks with the slightest response. Instead of him, a small, red-haired man with a sharp, wedge-shaped little beard called out from a far corner.
“Don’t condemn our host, my dear sir,” he began. “He takes it from experience, and what he says is true—with the hides it’s safe.”
“Oh?” a questioning response came from under the bearskin.
“Perfectly safe, sir, and it’s better for them that he doesn’t let them in.”
“Why is that?”
“Because now they’ll get themselves useful experience from it, and meanwhile if some helpless person or other comes knocking here, there’ll be room for him.”
“Who else would the devil bring here now?” said the fur coat.
“Listen, you,” the innkeeper put in. “Don’t spout empty words. Can the foul fiend bring anybody to where there’s such holy things? Don’t you see the icon of the Savior and the face of the Mother of God here?”
“That’s right,” the red-haired little man seconded. “Every saved person is guided by an angel, not by the dark one.”
“That’s something I’ve never seen, and since I find this a vile place, I don’t want to think my angel brought me here,” replied the garrulous fur coat.
The innkeeper only spat angrily, but the little redhead said good-naturedly that not everybody could behold the angel’s path, and you could only get a notion of it from real experience.
“You speak of it as if you’ve had such experience yourself,” said the fur coat.
“Yes, sir, I have.”
“So you saw an angel, and he led you—is that it?”
“Yes, sir, I saw him, and he guided me.”
“What, are you joking, or making fun?”
“God keep me from joking about such things!”
“So what precisely was it that you saw: how did the angel appear to you?”
“That, my dear sir, is a whole big story.”
“You know, it’s decidedly impossible to fall asleep here, and you’d be doing an excellent thing if you told us that story now.”
“As you wish, sir.”
“Please tell it, then: we’re listening. But why are you kneeling over there? Come here to us, maybe we can make room and all sit together.”
“No, sir, I thank you for that! Why crowd yourselves? And besides, the story I’m going to tell you is more properly told kneeling down, because it’s a highly sacred and even awesome thing.”
“Well, as you wish, only tell us quickly, how could you see an angel and what did he do to you?”
“If you please, sir, I’ll begin.”
II
As you can undoubtedly tell from my looks, I’m a totally insignificant man, nothing more than a muzhik, and the education I received was most village-like, as suited that condition. I’m not from hereabouts, but from far away; by trade I’m a mason, and I was born into the old Russian faith.3 On account of my orphanhood, from a young age I went with my countrymen to do itinerant work and worked in various places, but always with the same crew, under our peasant Luka Kirilovich. This Luka Kirilovich is still alive: he’s our foremost contractor. His business was from old times, established by his forefathers, and he didn’t squander it, but increased it and made himself a big and abundant granary,4 but he was and is a wonderful man and not an offender. And where, where didn’t our crew go with him! Seems we walked all over Russia, and nowhere have I seen a better and steadier master than him. We lived under him in the most peaceful patriarchy, and he was our contractor and our guide in trade and in faith. We followed him to work the way the Jews followed Moses in their wanderings in the desert; we even had our own tabernacle with us and never parted with it: that is, we had our own “God’s blessing” with us. Luka Kirilovich passionately loved holy icons, and, my dear sirs, he owned the most wonderful icons, of the most artful workmanship, ancient, either real Greek, or of the first Novgorod or Stroganov icon painters.5 Icon after icon shone not so much by their casings as by the keenness and fluency of their marvelous artistry. I’ve never seen such loftiness anywhere since!