Tales of the Wilderness Part 22

In front of him lay the village of Makhmytka; he had often ridden there in his youth on secret visits to a soldier's wife; but now he would not go to her; no, not for anything in the world! The village lay pressed to the earth and was ornamented with numerous stacks which smelt of straw and dung. On its outskirts the Prince was met by a pack of baying dogs, who flitted over the ground like dark, ghostly shadows as they leapt round him.

At the first cabin he tapped at the little window, dimly lighted within by some smouldering splinters.

"Who is there?" came the tardy response.

"Let me in for the night, good people," called the Prince.

"Who is it?"

"A traveller."

"Well, just a minute," came the grudging answer.

A bare-footed peasant in red drawers came out holding a lighted splinter over his head and looking round.

"Ah!" he exclaimed, "it is you, Prince! So you were too wise to stay, were you? Well, come in."

An immense quant.i.ty of straw was spread over the floor. A cricket was chirruping, and there was a smell of soot and dung.

"Lay yourself down, Barin, and G.o.d bless you!"

The peasant climbed on to the stove and sighed. His old wife began to mutter something, the man grumbled, then said to the Prince:

"Barin, you can have your sleep, only get up in the morning and leave before daylight, so that none will see you. You know yourself these are troubled times, there is no gainsaying it. You are a gentleman, Barin, and gentlemen have got to be done away with. The old woman will wake you.... Sleep now."

Prozorovsky lay down without undressing, put his cape under his head-- and at once caught a c.o.c.kroach on his neck! Some young pigs grunted in a corner. The hut was swarming with vermin, blackened by smoke and filled with stenches. Here, where men, calves and pigs herded all together, the Prince lay on his straw, tossing about and scratching.

He thought of how, some centuries hence, people would be writing of this age with love, compa.s.sion, and tenderness. It would be thought of as an epoch of the most sublime and beautiful manifestation of the human spirit.

A little pig came up, sniffed all round him, then trotted away again.

A low, bright star peeped in through the window. How infinite the world seemed!

He did not notice when he fell asleep. The old woman woke him at daybreak and led him through the backyard. The dawn was bright and cold, and the gra.s.s was covered with a light frost. He walked along briskly, swinging his stick, the collar of his overcoat turned up.

The sky was marvellously deep and blue.

At the station the Prince squeezed himself into a warm place on the train, amongst other pa.s.sengers carrying little sacks and bags of flour. Thus, pressed against the sides of a truck, his clothes bedaubed with white flour, he journeyed off to--Moscow.

Prince Prozorovsky had left at evening. Immediately after, furniture was pulled about and re-arranged, the veneer was chipped off the desk. The clock was about to be transferred to the office, but some one noticed that it had only one hand. None of the men realised that Kuvaldin's old clocks were necessarily one-handed, and moved every five minutes simply because the minutes were not counted singly in those days. Somebody suggested that the clock could be removed from its case.

"Take the clock out of the box," Ivan Koloturov ordered. "Tell the joiners to put some shelves in it, it will do as a cupboard for the office.... Now then, don't stamp, don't stamp!"

That night an old woman came running in. There was a great turmoil in the village: a girl had been abused--no one knew by whom, whether by the villagers themselves or the people who had come from Moscow for flour; the old woman began to accuse the Committee men. She stood by the window and reviled them at the top of her voice. Ivan Koloturov drove her away with a blow on the neck, and she went off wailing bitterly.

It was pitch-dark. The house was quiet. Milkmaids outside were singing boisterously. Ivan went into the study, sat down on the sofa, felt its softness, found a forgotten electric lamp and played with it, flas.h.i.+ng its light on the walls as he pa.s.sed through. He noticed the clock on the floor of the drawing-room and began to think what he would do with it, then he picked it up and threw it into the water- closet. A band of his men had broken their way into the other end of the house, and some one was thumping on the piano; Ivan Koloturov would have liked to have driven them away, to prevent them from doing damage, but he dared not. He suddenly felt sorry for himself and his old wife and he wanted to go home to his stove.

A bell clanged--supper! Ivan quietly stole to the wine-cellar, filled up his jug, and drank, then hurriedly locked the cellar door.

On the way home he fell down in the park; he lay there a long time, trying to lift himself, wanting all the while to say something and to explain--but he fell asleep.

The dark, dismal autumn night enfolded the empty, frozen, desolate Steppe.

DEATH

I

It seemed as though the golden days of "St. Martin's" summer had come to stay.

The sun shone without warmth in the vast blue expanse of sky, across which swept the gabbling cranes on their annual flight southward. A h.o.a.r-frost lay in the shadow of the houses. The air was crisp and sapphire, the cold invigorating, a brooding stillness wrapped the world.

The vine-wreathed columns on the terrace, the maple avenue and the ground beneath, all glowed under a purple pall of fallen leaves. The lake shone blue and smooth as a mirror, reflecting in its s.h.i.+ning surface the white landing-stage and its boat, the swans and the statues. The fruit was already plucked in the garden and the leaves were falling. What a foolish wanton waste this stripping of the trees after summer seemed!

In days such as these, the mind grows at once alert and calm. It dwells peacefully on the past and the future. The individual feels impelled by a kind of langour just to walk over the fallen leaves, to look in the gardens for unnoticed, forgotten apples, and to listen to the cries of the cranes flying south.

II

Ippolyte Ippolytovich was a hundred years old less three months and some days. He had been a student in the Moscow University with Lermontov, and they had been drawn together in friends.h.i.+p through their mutual admiration of Byron. In the "sixties,"--he was then close to his fiftieth birthday--he constantly conferred with the Emperor Alexander on liberative reforms, and pored over Pisarev's writings in his own home.

It was only by the huge, skeleton frame over which stretched the parchment skin, that it could be seen he had once been a tall, big, broad-shouldered man; his large face was covered with yellowish-white hair that crept from the nose, the cheek-bones, the forehead and the ears, while the skull was completely bald; the eyes were white and discoloured; the hands and legs shrunken, and seemed as though emaciated by nature's own design.

There was a smell of wax in his room, and that peculiar fusty odour that pervades every old n.o.bleman's home. It was a large, bare apartment containing only a ma.s.sive mahogany writing-table, covered with a faded green cloth and bestrewn with a quant.i.ty of old- fas.h.i.+oned ornaments; there was also an armchair and a sofa.

The moulded ceiling, the greenish-white marbled walls, the dragon fire-place, the inlaid flooring of speckled birch, the window panes, rounded at the tops, curtainless and with frequent intersecting of their framework, all, had become tarnished and l.u.s.treless, covered over with all the colours of the rainbow. Through the windows streamed the mellow golden rays of the autumn sun, resting on the table, a part of the sofa, and on the floor.

For many years the old man had ceased to sleep at night so as to sit up by day. It might truly be said that he slept almost the entire twenty-four hours, and also that he sat up during the whole of that time! He was always slumbering, lying with half-open, discoloured eyes on a large sofa tapestried in pig-skin of English make, and covered with a bear-skin rug. He lay there day and night, his right arm flung back behind his head. Whenever, by day or night, he was called by his name--Ippolyte Ippolytovich, he would remain silent a moment collecting his wits, then answer:

"Eh?"

He had no thoughts. All that took place round him, all that he had gone through in life, was meaningless to him now. It was all outlived, and he had nothing to think about. Neither had he any feelings, for all his organs of receptivity had grown dulled.

At night mice could be heard; while through the empty, columned hall out of which his room opened, rats scurried, flopping about and tumbling down from the armchairs and tables. But the old man did not hear them.

III

Vasilisa Vasena came every morning at seven o'clock; she was a country-woman of about thirty seven, strong, healthy, red-faced, reminiscent of a July day in her floridness and vigorous health.

She used to say quietly: "Good morning to you, Ippolyte Ippolytovich."

And he would give a base "Eh?" in a voice like a worn-out gramophone record.

Vasena promptly began was.h.i.+ng him with a sponge, then fed him with manna-gruel. The old man sat bent up on the sofa, his hands resting on his knees. He ate slowly from a spoon. They were silent, his eyes gazing inwardly, seeing nothing. Sunbeams stole in through the window and glistened on his yellowish hair.

"Your good son, Ilya Ippolytovich, has come," Vasena said.

"Eh?"

Ippolyte Ippolytovich had married at about the age of forty; of his three sons only Ilya was living. The old man called his son to memory, pictured him in his mind, but felt neither joy nor interest-- felt nothing!