"And you . . . did you give it her?"
"I remember. ... I gave her ten rubles.''
''Oh .. . is it possible?" Uzelkov frowned. "If yo" couldn't do it yourself, or you didn't want to, you could hav?-
Mitten to me. . . . And I didn't know ... I didn't know.
"My dear man, why should I write, when she wrote herself afterwards when she was in hospital?"
"I was so taken up with the new marriage that I paid no attention to letters. . . . But you were an outsider; you had no antagonism to Sofya Mikhailovna. . . . Why didn't you help her?
"We can't judge by our present standards, Boris Petrovich. Now we think in this way; but then we thought quite dif- ferently. . . . Now I might perhaps give her a thousand rubles; but then even ten rubles . . . she didn't get them for nothing. It's a terrible story. It's time to forget. . . . But here you areT'
The sledge stopped at the churchyard gate. Uzelkov and Shapkin got out of the sledge, went through the gate and walked along a long, broad avenue. The bare cherry trees, the acacias, the grey crosses and monuments sparkled with hoar-frost. In each flake of snow the bright sunny day was reflected. There was the smell you find in all cemeteries of incense and fresh-dug earth.
"You have a beautiful cemetery/' said Uzelkov. "It's al- most an orchard/'
"Yes, but it's a pity the thieves steal the monuments. Look, there, behind that cast-iron memorial, on the right, Sofya Mikhailovna is buried. Would you like to see?"
The friends turned to the right, stepping in deep snow to- wards the cast-iron memorial.
"Down here/' said Shapkin, pointing to a littie stone of white marble. "Some subaltern or other put up the monu- ment on her grave."
Uzelkov slowly took off his hat and showed his bald pate to the snow. Eyeing him, Shapkin also took off his hat, and another baldness shone beneath the sun. The silence round about was like the tomb, as though the air were dead, too. The friends looked at the stone, silent, thinking.
"She is asleep!" Shapkin broke the silence. "And she cares very little that she took the guilt upon herself and drank cognac. Confess, Boris Petrovich!"
"What?" asked Uzelkov, sternly.
"That, however loathsome the past may be, it's better than this/' And Shapkin pointed to his grey hairs.
"In the old days I did not even think of death. . . .If I'd met her, I would have circumvented her, but now .. . well, now!"
Sadness took hold of Uzelkov. Suddenly he wanted to cry, passionately, as he once desired to love. . . . And he felt that these tears would be exquisite, refreshing. Moisture came out of his eyes and a lump rose in his throat, but .. . Shapkin was standing by his side, and Uzelkov felt ashamed of his weakness before a witness. He turned back quickly and walked towards the church.
Two hours later, having arranged with the churchwarden and examined the church, he seized the opportunity while .Shapkin was talking away to the priest, and ran to shed a tear. He walked to the stone surreptitiously, with stealthy steps, looking round all the time. The little white monument stared at him absently, so sadly and innocently, as though a girl and not a wanton divorcee were beneath.
"If I could weep, could weep!" thought Uzelkov.
But the moment for weeping had been lost. Though the old man managed to make his eyes shine, and tried to bring himself to the right pitch, the tears did not flow and the lump did not rise in his throat. . . . After waiting for about ten minutes, Uzelkov waved his arm and went to look for Shapkin.
KASHTANKA
i
MISBEHAVIOUR
A young dog, a reddish mongrel, between a dachshund and a "yard-dog/' very like a fox in face, was running up and down the pavement looking uneasily from side to side. From time to time she stopped and, whining and lifting first one chilled paw and then another, tried to make up her mind how it could have happened that she was lost.
She remembered very well how she had passed the day, and how, in the end, she had found herself on this unfamiliar pavement.
The day had begun by her master Luka Alexandritch's putting on his hat, taking something wooden under his arm wrapped up in a red handkerchief, and cailing: "Kashtanka, come along! "
Hearing her name the mongrel had come out {rom under the work-table, where she slept on the shavings, stretched herself voluptuously and run after her master. The people Luka Alexandritch worked for lived a very long way off, so that, before he could get to any one of them, the carpenter had several times to step into a tavern to fortify himself. Kash- tanka remembered that on the way she had behaved extremely improperly. In her delight that she was being taken for a walk she jumped about, dashed barking after the trams, ran into yards, and chased other dogs. The carpenter was continually losing sight of her, stopping, and angrily shouting at her. Once he had even, with an expression of fury in his
14
face, taken her fox-like ear in his fist, smacked her, and said emphatically: "Pla-a-ague take you, you pest!"
After having left the work where it had been bespoken, Luka Alexandritch went into his sister's and there had some- thing to eat and drink; from his sister's he had gone to see a bookbinder he knew; from the bookbinder's to a tavern, from the tavern to another crony's, and so on. In short, by the time Kashtanka found herself on the unfamiliar pavement, it was getting dusk, and the carpenter was as drunk as a cobbler. He was waving his arms and, breathing heavily, muttered:
"In sin my mother bore me! Ah, sins, sins! Here now we are walking along the street and looking at the street lamps, but when we die, we shall burn in a fiery Gehenna... ."
Or he fell into a good-natured tone, called Kashtanka to him, and said to her: "You, Kashtanka, are an insect of a creature, and nothing else. Beside a man, you are much the same as a joiner beside a cabinet-maker. . . ."
While he talked to her in that way, there was suddenly a burst of music. Kashtanka looked round and saw that a regi- ment of soldiers was coming straight towards her. Unable to endure the music, which unhinged her nerves, she turned round and round and wailed. To her great surprise, the car- penter, instead of being frightened, whining and barking, gave a broad grin, drew himself up to attention, and saluted with all his five fingers. Seeing that her master did not pro- test, Kashtanka whined louder than ever, and dashed across the road to the opposite pavement.
\\Vhen she recovered herself, the band was not playing and the regiment was no longer there. She ran across the road to the spot where she had left her master, but alas, the carpenter was no longer there. She dashed forward, then back again and ran across the road once more, but the carpenter seemed to have vanished into the earth. Kashtanka began sniffing the pavement, hoping to find her master by the scent of his tracks, but some wretch had been that way just before in new rubber golvshes, and now all delicate scents were mixed witb an acute stench of india-rubber, so that it was lmpossible to make out anything.
Kashtanka ran up and down and did not find her master, and meanwhile it had got dark. The street lamps were lighted on both sides of the road, and lights appeared in the windows. Big, fluffy snowflakes were falling and painting white the pavement, the horses' backs and the cabmen's caps, and the darker the evening grew the whiter were all these objects. Unknown customers kept walking incessantly to and fro, obstructing her field of vision and shoving against her with their feet. (All mankind Kashtanka divided into two uneven parts: masters and customers; between them there was an essential difference: the first had the right to beat her, and the second she had the right to nip by the calves of their legs.) These customers were hurrying off somewhere and paid no attention to her.
When it got quite dark, Kashtanka was overcome by despair and horror. She huddled up in an entrance and be- gan whining piteously. The long day's journeying with Luka Alexandritch had exhausted her, her ears and her paws were freezing, and, what was more, she was terribly hungry. Only twice in the whole day had she tasted a morseclass="underline" she had eaten a little paste at the bookbinder's, and in one of the taverns she had found a sausage skin on the floor, near the counter— that was all. If she had been a human being she would have certainly thought: "No, it is impossible to live like this! I must shoot myself!"