THE VILLAGE

Ivan Alekseevich Bunin

I

THE great-grandfather of the Krasoffs, known by the manor-house servants under the nickname of “The Gipsy,” was hunted with wolf-hounds by Cavalry Captain Durnovo. The Gipsy had lured his lord-and-master’s mistress away from him. Durnovo gave orders that The Gipsy should be taken out into the fields and placed on a hillock. Then he himself went out there with a pack of hounds and shouted “Tallyho! Go for him!” The Gipsy, who was sitting there in a state of stupor, started to run. But there is no use in running away from wolf-hounds.

The grandfather of the Krasoffs, for some reason or other, was given a letter of enfranchisement. He went off with his family to the town—and soon distinguished himself by becoming a famous thief. He hired a tiny hovel in the Black Suburb for his wife and set her to weaving lace for sale, while he, in company with a petty burgher named Byelokopytoff, roamed about the province robbing churches. At the end of a couple of years he was caught. But at his trial he bore himself in such fashion that his replies to the judges were current for a long time thereafter. He stood before them, it appears, in a velveteen kaftan, with a silver watch and goat-hide boots, making insolent play with his cheek-bones and his eyes and, in the most respectful manner, confessing every one of his innumerable crimes, even the most insignificant: “Yes, sir. Just so, sir.”

The father of the Krasoffs was a petty huckster. He roved about the county, lived for a time in Durnovka, set up a pot-house and a little shop, failed, took to drink, returned to the town, and soon died. After serving for a while in shops his sons, Tikhon and Kuzma, who were almost of an age, also took to peddling. They drove about in a peasant cart which had a carved front and a roofed, shop-like arrangement in the middle, and shouted in doleful tones: “Wo-omen, here’s merchandise! Wo-omen, here’s merchandise!”

The merchandise consisted of small mirrors, cheap soap, rings, thread, kerchiefs, needles, cracknels—these in the covered shop. The open-body cart contained everything they gathered in: dead cats, eggs, heavy linen, crash, rags. But one day, after having thus travelled about for the space of several years, the brothers came near cutting each other’s throats—in a dispute over the division of the profits, rumour averred—and separated to avoid a catastrophe. Kuzma hired himself to a drover. Tikhon took over a small posting-house on the metalled highway of Vorgol, five versts[1] from Durnovka, and opened a dram-shop and a tiny “popular” shop.—“I deal in small wears tea shugar tubako sigars and so furth.”

I

ALMOST all his life long Kuzma had dreamed of writing, of obtaining an education. Verses did not count. He had dallied with verses as a mere child. He longed to narrate how he had come to naught; to depict, with unprecedented ruthlessness, his poverty and that dreadful factor in his commonplace life which had crippled him, made of him a barren fig-tree.

When he reviewed his life in his own mind he both condemned and acquitted himself. Yes, he was an indigent petty townsman who, almost up to the age of fifteen, had been able to read only by spelling out every word. But his history was the history of all self-taught Russians. He had been born in a country which had more than a hundred million illiterate inhabitants. He had grown up in the Black Suburb, where down to the present day men fight to the death with their fists. In his childhood he had seen dirt and drunkenness, laziness and boredom. His childhood had furnished only one poetical impression: there had been the dark cemetery grove, and the pasture on the hill behind the Suburb, and beyond that—space, the hot mirage of the steppe, a white cottage beneath a poplar-tree in the far distance. But he had been taught to look upon even this cottage with scorn: Little Russians dwelt there, and, of course, they were so stupid that in reply to the question, “Little Russians, where are your kettles?”[14] they said: “Do you need to be told that they are under the wagons?” He and Tikhon had been taught the alphabet and figures by a neighbour named Byelkin, whose trade was to make rubber overshoes in moulds; but he had taught them because he never had any work—for what demand was there in the Suburb for overshoes?—and because it was always agreeable to pull some one’s hair, and because a man cannot sit for ever on the earth wall alongside his hut absolutely idle, with his frowsy head bent and exposed to the sun, doing nothing but spit in the dust between his bare feet.

In Matorin’s shop the brothers had speedily attained to writing and reading, and Kuzma had begun to be attracted by the little books which the accordeon-player, old Balashkin, the eccentric free-thinker of the bazaar, gave him. But what chance for reading was there in the shop? Matorin very often shouted: “I’ll box your ears for those books of yours, you abominable little devil!”

That was an old story; but Kuzma wished to recall, also, the morals of the bazaar. In the bazaar he had picked up much that was opprobrious. There he and his brother had been taught to sneer at the poverty of their mother, at her having taken to drink, abandoned as she was by her adolescent sons. There they once played the following prank: Every day, on his way from the library, the son of the tailor Vitebsky passed the door of the shop—a Jew aged sixteen, with a pallid greyish face; a terribly lean, big-eared fellow who wore spectacles and industriously read as he walked, his book held close up to his eyes. So they threw some bricks and rubbish on the sidewalk—and the Jew (“that learned man!”) stumbled so successfully that he bruised his knees, elbows, and teeth to the point of bleeding. Then Kuzma started to write. He began a story about a merchant who, driving by night in a fearful thunderstorm through the Murom forests, came upon an encampment of bandits and got his throat cut. Kuzma fervently set forth his remarks and thoughts on the brink of death, his grief over his iniquitous life, “so prematurely cut short.” But the bazaar mercilessly threw cold water on it.

“Well, you are a queer one, Lord forgive us!” it pronounced, merrily and insolently, through Tikhon’s mouth. “‘Prematurely’! That pot-bellied devil ought to have been done for long before! Well, and how did you know what he was thinking about? They cut his throat, didn’t they?”

Then Kuzma wrote, in the style of Koltzoff, a ballad about an extremely ancient knight who bequeathed to his son a faithful steed. “He carried me in my youth!” exclaimed the hero in the ballad. But Tikhon merely shook his head over that.

“Really!” said he, “how old was that horse? Akh, Kuzma! Kuzma! You’d better compose something practical—well, about the war, for example.”

And Kuzma, catering to the taste of the market-place, began with great zeal to write about what the bazaar was discussing at the moment—the Russo-Turkish war: about how—

and how those hordes

Later on it pained him to realize how much stupidity and ignorance this doggerel contained, the servile quality of its language, and its Russian scorn for foreign headgear. With pain he recalled much else. For example, Zadonsk. One day there he was overcome by a passionate longing for repentance, a terror lest his mother, who had died, practically, of starvation, had bitterly reported in heaven her sorrowful life; and he set forth on foot to the abode of a holy man. Once there, he did nothing whatever except to read to assembled admirers, with malicious joy, a “sheet” which had made a special impression on him: how a certain village scribe had taken it into his head to reject the authorities and the Church, and God had waxed so wroth that “this aristocrat was laid low on his bed of death,” his malady such that “he devoured more than a pig, and shrieked that that was not enough, and withered away until he was unrecognizable.” And Kuzma’s entire youth was spent in just such affairs! He thought and professed one thing—and said and did something entirely different. Aspiring to write and reckoning up the sum-total of his life, Kuzma shook his head mournfully: “A genuine Russian trait, sir! The sowing was half peas, half thistles.”

It seemed as if he had been merry in his youth, kind, tender, quick to understand, eager to learn. But was it really so? He was not Tikhon, of course. But why had he, equally with Tikhon, assimilated so promptly the savagery of those who surrounded him? Why had he, kind and tender as he was, so mercilessly neglected his mother? Why had the bazaar so long reigned supreme over his heart, which was toiling so ardently over books? Why, why was he—a barren fig-tree?

Tikhon had been in the habit of keeping most of his earnings in one common money-box: they had decided to set up in business for themselves. Kuzma surrendered his money with a full, hearty confidence which Tikhon never possessed. But his mother, his mother! He groaned as he recalled how, poverty-stricken as she was, she had bestowed her blessing on him, had given him her sole treasure, a relic of her better days, which had been preserved at the bottom of her chest—a small silver-mounted holy picture. And the fact that he had groaned was good, also; but all the same his money had gone to Tikhon.

I

THE estate at Durnovka was arranged after the plan of a farm. In fact, it had originally borne precisely that title. Durnovo had owned several estates and had occupied the chief of them, the one at Zusha. Afanasiy Ilitch, who had hunted the Gipsy with dogs, came only occasionally to Durnovka, on his way from a hunting expedition. Nil Afansaievitch, the Marshal of the Nobility, had no taste for farms: he had spent his whole life in organizing dinners, drinking sherry at his club, glorying in his fat, his appetite, his ringing whisper—he had a silver throat—in his lavishness, his witticisms, and his absence of mind. And his son, also, the Uhlan, who bore the name of his grandfather, rarely looked in at Durnovka. The Uhlan still considered himself a great landed proprietor. On retiring from the service he decided to accumulate millions, to show how an estate ought to be managed. But the Uhlan was not fond of being in the fields, and his passion for making purchases helped to ruin him: he bought almost everything his eye fell upon. His trips to Moscow and his amorous constitution likewise contributed to his ruin. His son, who did not finish at the Lyceum, received as his heritage only two farms—Laukhino and Durnovka. And the Lyceum student ruined these to such a point that, during the last year he spent at Durnovka, the duties of watchman were discharged by an old scullery-maid, who went about at night with her mallet, garbed in a rusty raccoon cloak. “Well, never mind,” Kuzma said to himself, rejoiced to the verge of tears by Tikhon’s proposal, and profoundly concealing his joy. “If ’tis a farm, call it a farm! A good thing, too: ’tis a regular end-of-nowhere, savage as in the Tatar times!”

At one period Ilya Mironoff had lived in Durnovka for a couple of years. At the time Kuzma had been a mere child, and all he retained of it in his memory was, first, the fragrant hemp-fields, which drowned Durnovka, as it were, in a dark-green sea, and, secondly, one dark summer night. There had been not a single light in the village on that night. Past their cottage had filed, their chemises gleaming white in the darkness, “nine maidens, nine women, and the tenth a widow,” all barefoot, with hair flowing free, armed with brooms, oaken cudgels, and pitchforks. A deafening ringing of bells had arisen, and a thumping of oven-covers and frying pans, high above which soared a wild choral chant. The widow dragged a plough; alongside her walked a maiden carrying a large holy picture; while the rest rang bells, and thumped, and when the widow led off in a low tone,

the chorus repeated in long-drawn tones, with funereal intonations:

“We plough—”

and mournfully, in throaty tones, took up the refrain,

“With incense, with the cross ...”

Now the aspect of the Durnovka fields was commonplace. The hemp plantations had vanished, and, even if they had not, the fields would have been bare in autumn, as well as the vegetable patches and the back yards. Kuzma set forth from Vorgol in a cheerful and slightly intoxicated state. Tikhon Ilitch had treated him to liqueur cordial at dinner, and at tea, after dinner, Nastasya Petrovna had treated him to two kinds of preserves. Tikhon Ilitch was very kindly disposed on that day. He recalled his youth, his childhood; how they had eaten buckwheat cakes together, how they had shouted “Tallyho!” after the Dog’s Pistol, and had studied with Byelkin; he called his wife “auntie” and ridiculed her trips to the nun Polukarpia for the good of her soul; he said, with regard to Kuzma’s salary: “We’ll square that, dear brother, we’ll make that right—I’ll not wrong you!” He referred briefly to the revolution: “That little bird started singing too early—look out, or the cat will eat it!” Kuzma rode a dark brown gelding, and around him lay outspread a sea of dark brown ploughed fields. The sun, almost like that of summer, the transparent air, the clear pale-blue sky, all gladdened him and gave promise of prolonged repose. The grey, crooked wormwood, turned up roots and all by the plough, was so plentiful that it was being carried off by the carload. Close to the farm itself, in the ploughed field, stood a wretched little nag, with burdocks in his forelock, and a springless cart, piled high with wormwood; and beside it lay Yakoff, bare-legged, in dusty breeches and a long hempen shirt, his side squeezed against a large grey dog which he was holding by the ear. The dog was growling and darting angry sidelong glances.

“Does he bite?” shouted Kuzma.

“He’s savage—there’s no taming him!” Yakoff made haste to reply, as he raised his slanting beard. “He jumps at the horses’ muzzles.”

And Kuzma burst out laughing with pleasure. The peasant was a regular peasant—and the steppe was a genuine steppe!

The road ran down a hill, and the horizon became narrower. In front the new iron roof of a grain-kiln gleamed green, seeming drowned in the dense low growths of the park. Beyond the park, on the opposite slope, stood a long row of cottages constructed of bricks moulded from clay, and roofed with straw. On the right, beyond the ploughed fields, stretched a large ravine, merging into the one which separated the farm from the village. At the point where the ravines came together, a pond lay sparkling in the sunlight. On the promontory between them the wings of two unsheathed windmills reared themselves aloft, surrounded by several cottages belonging to one-homestead owners—the Mysoffs,[32] as Oska had dubbed them—and the whitewashed schoolhouse gleamed white on the pasture land.

“Well, and do the children get schooling?” inquired Kuzma.

“’Tis obligatory,” said Oska. “They have a scholar who is a terror!”

“What scholar are you talking about? Do you mean a teacher?”

“Well, then, teacher, it’s all the same. The way he has educated those brats—I tell you, ’tis fine. He’s a soldier. He beats them unmercifully, but on the other hand he has them well trained in all sorts of ways. Tikhon Ilitch and I happened to drop in one day—and if they didn’t all leap to their feet and bark out: ‘We wish you health!’ just as well as if they were soldiers!”

And once more Kuzma broke into a laugh.

But when he had passed the threshing-floor, had descended by the defective road past the cherry orchard and turned to the left, to the long farmyard, lying well dried and golden-hued in the sun, his heart actually began to beat violently. Here he was, at home, at last. And as he mounted the porch and stepped across the threshold, Kuzma gave vent to a sigh, and, making the sign of the cross on brow and breast, he bowed low before the dark holy picture in the corner of the ante-room....

And for a long time he cared not whether the Russian people had a future or not. He roamed about the manor estate, the village; he sat for hours at a time on the doorsteps of the cottages, on the threshing-floors—watching the inhabitants of Durnovka, enjoying the possibility of breathing pure air, of chatting with his new neighbours.

IX

DURING the Christmas holidays Ivanushka, from Basovka, dropped in to see Kuzma. He was an old-fashioned peasant who had grown foolish from old age, although once on a time he had been renowned for his bear-like strength. Thickset, bent into a bow, he never lifted his shaggy dark brown head. He always walked with his toes turned inward. And he amazed Kuzma even more than had Menshoff, Akim, and Syery. In the cholera year of ’ninety-two, the whole of Ivanushka’s huge family had died. All he had left was a son, a soldier, who was now working for the railway as a line-guard, about five versts from Durnovka. Ivanushka might have passed his declining days with his son, but he preferred to roam about and ask alms. He strode lightly, in his bandy-legged way, across the farmyard, with his cap and his staff in his left hand, a bag in his right, and his head, on which the snow shone white, uncovered—and for some reason or other the sheep dogs did not growl at him. He entered the house, mumbled “May God bless this house and the master of this house,” and seated himself on the floor against the wall. Kuzma dropped his book and in amazement stared timidly at him over his eyeglasses, as if he had been some wild beast from the steppe, whose presence inside a house was a prodigy.

Silently, with downcast lashes and a slight amiable smile, the Bride made her appearance, walking lightly in her bark-slippers, gave Ivanushka a bowl of boiled potatoes and the entire corner crust of a loaf, all grey with salt, and remained standing at the door-jamb. She wore bark-slippers; she was broad and robust in the shoulders; and her handsome, faded face was so simple and old-fashioned, in the peasant style, that it seemed as if she could not possibly address Ivanushka otherwise than as “grandfather.” And, smiling for him and him alone, she did indeed say softly: “Eat, eat, grandfather.”

And he, without raising his head, and recognizing her kindliness from her voice alone, quietly wailed in reply, at times mumbling: “The Lord save ye, granddaughter!” then crossed himself broadly and awkwardly, as if his hand had been a paw, and eagerly fell to on the food. The snow melted on his dark brown hair, supernaturally thick and coarse. The water streamed down from his bark-shoes on to the floor. From his ancient dark brown fitted coat, worn over a dirty hemp-crash shirt, emanated the smoky odour of a chimneyless hovel. His hands were deformed by long toil, and his horny unbending fingers fished up the potatoes with difficulty.

“You must feel cold in that thin coat, don’t you?” inquired Kuzma, in a loud tone.

“Hey?” answered Ivanushka in a faint wail, holding his hand to his ear, which was all overgrown with hair.

“You are cold, aren’t you?”

Ivanushka thought it over. “Why cold?” he replied, pausing between his words. “Not a bit cold. ’Twas a lot colder in days gone by.”

“Lift up your head; put your hair in order!”

Ivanushka slowly shook his head.

“I can’t raise it now, brother. It drags earthward.” And with a dim smile he made an effort to lift his dreadful face, all overgrown with hair, and his tiny screwed-up eyes.

When he had finished eating he heaved a sigh, made the sign of the cross, collected the crumbs from his knees and chewed them up; then he felt about at his sides, in search of his bag, stick, and cap, and, having found them, and recovered his equanimity, he began a leisurely conversation. He was capable of sitting silent for the whole day, but Kuzma and the Bride plied him with questions, and he answered, as if asleep and from a far distance. He narrated in his clumsy, ancient language that the Tsar was made entirely of gold; that the Tsar could not eat fish—’twas exceeding salt—that once on a time the Prophet Elijah broke through the sky and tumbled down on the earth—“he was exceedingly heavy”—that John the Baptist was as shaggy as a ram when he was born, and that at his baptism he beat his godfather over the head with his iron crutch, in order that the man might “come to his senses”; that every horse, once a year, on St. Flor and St. Lavr’s Day, seeks an opportunity to kill a man. He told how in days of yore the rye had grown up so densely that it was impossible for a snake to crawl through it; how in those times they reaped at the rate of two desyatini a day for each man; how he himself had owned a gelding which was kept “on a chain,” so powerful and terrible was it; how one day sixty years agone he, Ivanushka, had had a shaft arch stolen from him for which he would not have accepted two rubles. He was firmly convinced that his family had died, not of cholera, but because after a fire they had gone to a new cottage and had passed the night in it without having first let a cock pass the night there, and that he and his son had been saved solely by accident: he had slept on the grain-rick.

Toward evening Ivanushka rose and walked away, without paying the slightest heed to what the weather was like and without yielding to all their admonitions to remain until the morrow. And he caught his death cold, and on Epiphany Day he died in his son’s guard-box. His son urged him to receive the Sacrament. Ivanushka would not consent; he said that once you received the Communion you would surely die, whereas he was firmly determined not to “yield to death.” For whole days at a time he lay unconscious; but even in his delirium he begged his daughter-in-law to say that he was not at home if Death should knock at the door. Once, at night, he came to himself, collected his forces, crept down from the top of the oven, and knelt down in front of the holy picture, illuminated by a shrine-lamp. He sighed heavily, mumbled for a long time, kept repeating: “O Lord—Dear Little Father—forgive my sins.” Then he became thoughtful and remained silent for a long time, with his head bowed on the floor. Then, all of a sudden, he rose to his feet and said firmly: “No. I will not yield!” But the next morning he noticed that his daughter-in-law was rolling out the dough for patties and heating the oven hot.

“Are you preparing for my funeral?” he asked, in a quavering voice.

His daughter-in-law made no reply. Again he collected his forces, again crawled down from the oven, and went out into the vestibule. Yes, it was true: there, upright against the wall, stood a huge purple coffin, adorned with white eight-pointed crosses. Then he remembered what had happened thirty years before, to his neighbour old Lukyan: Lukyan had fallen ill, and they had bought a coffin for him—it, too, was a fine, expensive coffin—and brought from the town flour, vodka, salted striped bass; but Lukyan went and got well. What was to be done with the coffin? How were they to justify the outlay? They cursed Lukyan about it for the space of five years thereafter, made life unendurable with their reproaches, tortured him with hunger, drove him frantic with lice and dirt. Ivanushka, recalling this, bowed his head and submissively went back into the cottage. And that night, as he lay on his back, unconscious, he began, in a trembling, plaintive voice, to sing, ever more and more softly. And suddenly he shook his knees, hiccoughed, raised his chest high with a sigh, and, with foam on his parted lips, grew cold in death....

FOOTNOTES:

II

BY the time Tikhon Hitch was about forty years of age his beard resembled silver with patterns of black enamel. But he was handsome and tall, with a fine figure, as before. He was austere and swarthy of face, slightly pock-marked, with broad, lean shoulders; authoritative and abrupt of speech, quick and supple in his movements. Only—his eyebrows had begun to come closer together and his eyes to flash more frequently and more sharply than before. Business demanded it!

Indefatigably he followed up the rural police on those dull autumnal days when taxes are collected and forced sale follows forced sale. Unweariedly he bought standing grain on the stalk from the landed proprietors and took land from them and from the peasants, in small parcels, not scorning even half a meadow. He lived for a long time with his dumb cook—“A dumb woman can’t betray anything with her chatter!”—and had by her one child, whom she overlay and crushed in her sleep, after which he married an elderly waiting-maid of old Princess Schakhovoy. And on marrying and receiving the dowry he “finished off” the last scion of the impoverished Durnovo family, a fat, affable young nobleman, bald at twenty-five, but possessed of a magnificent chestnut beard. And the peasants fairly grunted with pride when Tikhon took possession of the Durnovo estate—for almost the whole of Durnovka consisted of Krasoffs!

They sh-ed and oh-ed, also, over the way in which he had cunningly contrived not to ruin himself. He bargained and bought, went to the estate almost every day, kept watch with the eye of a vulture over every hand’s breadth of the land. They uttered admiring exclamations and said: “Yes, there’s nothing to be done with us devils by kindness, you know! There’s a master for you! You couldn’t have one more just!”

And Tikhon Ilitch dealt with them in the same spirit. When he was in an amiable mood he read them their lesson thus: “It’s all right to live—but not to squander. I shall pluck you if I get the chance! I shall bring you back. But I shall be just. I’m a Russian man, brother.” When in an evil mood, he would say curtly, with eyes blazing: “Pigs! There is not a juster man in the world than I am!” “Pigs, all right—but that’s not me,” the peasant would think, averting his eyes from that gaze. And he would mumble submissively: “Oh, Lord, don’t we know it?” “Yes, you know it, but you have forgotten. I don’t want your property gratis, but bear this in mind: I won’t give you a scrap of what’s mine! There’s that brother of mine: he’s a rascal, a toper, but I would help him if he came and implored me. I call God as my witness that I would help him! But coddle him—! No, take note of that: I do no coddling. I’m no brainless Little Russian, brother!”

And Nastasya Petrovna, who walked like a duck, with her toes turned inward, and waddled, thanks to her incessant pregnancies which always ended up with dead girl-babies—Nastasya Petrovna, a yellow, puffy woman with scanty whitish-blond hair, would groan and back him up: “Okh, you are a simpleton, in my opinion! Why do you bother with him, with that stupid man? Is he a fit associate for you? You just knock some sense into him; ’twill do him no harm. Look at the way he’s straddling with his legs—as if he were a bokhar of emir!”[2] She was “terribly fond” of pigs and fowls, and Tikhon Ilitch began to fatten sucking pigs, turkey chicks, hens, and geese. But his ruling passion was amassing grain. In autumn, alongside his house, which stood with one side turned toward the highway and the other toward the posting-station, the creaking of wheels arose in a groan; the wagon trains turned in from above and below. And in the farmyard horse-traders, peddlers, chicken-vendors, cracknel peddlers, scythe-vendors, and pilgrims passed the night. Every moment a pulley was squeaking—now on the door of the dram-shop, where Nastasya Petrovna bustled about; now on the approach to the shop, a dark, dirty place, reeking of soap, herrings, rank tobacco, gingerbread flavoured with peppermint, horse-collars, and kerosene. And incessantly there rang out in the dram-shop:

“U-ukh! Your vodka is strong, Petrovna! It has knocked me in the head, devil take it!”

“’Twill make your mouth water, my dear man!”

“Is there snuff in your vodka?”

“Well, now, you fool yourself!”

In the shop the crowd was even more dense.

“Ilitch, weigh me out a pound of ham.”

“This year, brother, I’m so well stocked with ham—so well stocked, thank God!”

“What’s the price?”

“’Tis cheap!”

“Hey, proprietor, have you good tar?”

“Better tar than your grandfather had at his wedding, my good man!”[3]

“What’s the price?”

And it seemed as if, at the Krasoffs’, there were never any other conversation than that about the prices of things: What’s the price of ham, what’s the price of boards, what’s the price of groats, what’s the price of tar?

III

THE abandonment of his hope of having children and the closing of the dram-shops by the government were great events. Tikhon visibly aged when there no longer remained any doubt that he was not to become a father. At first he jested about it: “No sir, I’ll get my way. Without children a man is not a man. He’s only so-so—a sort of spot missed in the sowing.” But later on he was assailed by terror. What did it mean? one overlay her child, the other bore only dead children.

And the period of Nastasya Petrovna’s last pregnancy had been a difficult time. Tikhon Ilitch suffered and raged: Nastasya Petrovna prayed in secret, wept in secret, and was a pitiful sight when, of a night by the light of the shrine-lamp, she slipped out of bed, assuming that her husband was asleep, and began with difficulty to kneel down, touch her brow to the floor as she whispered her prayers, gaze with anguish at the holy pictures, and rise from her knees painfully, like an old woman. Hitherto, before going to bed, she had donned slippers and dressing-gown, said her prayers indifferently, and, as she prayed, taken pleasure in running over the list of her acquaintances and abusing them. Now there stood before the holy picture a simple peasant woman in a short cotton petticoat, white woolen stockings, and a chemise which did not cover her neck and arms, fat like those of an old person.

Tikhon Ilitch had never, from his childhood, liked shrine-lamps, although he had never been willing to confess it, even to himself; nor did he like their uncertain churchly light. All his life there had remained impressed upon his mind that November night when, in the tiny lop-sided hut in the Black Suburb, a shrine-lamp had also burned, peaceful and sweetly-sad, the shadows of its chains barely moving, while everything around was deathly silent; and on the bench below the holy pictures his father lay motionless with eyes closed, his sharp nose raised, his big purplish-waxen hands crossed on his breast; while by his side, just beyond the tiny window curtained with its red rag, the conscripts marched past with wildly mournful songs and shouts, their accordions squealing discordantly.—Now the shrine-lamp burned uninterruptedly, and Tikhon Ilitch felt as if Nastasya Petrovna were carrying on some sort of secret affair with uncanny powers.

A number of book-hawkers from the Vladimir government halted by the posting-house to bait their horses—with the result that there made its appearance in the house a “New Complete Oracle and Magician, which foretells the future in answer to questions; with Supplement setting forth the easiest methods of telling fortunes by cards, beans, and coffee.” And of an evening Nastasya Petrovna would put on her spectacles, mould a little ball of wax, and set to rolling it over the circles of the “Oracle.” And Tikhon Ilitch would look on, with sidelong glances. But all the answers turned out to be either insulting, menacing, or senseless.

“Does my husband love me?” Nastasya Petrovna would inquire.

And the “Oracle” replied: “He loves you as a dog loves a stick.”

“How many children shall I have?”

“You are fated to die: the field must be cleared of weeds.”

Then Tikhon Ilitch would say: “Give it here. I’11 have a try.” And he would propound the question: “Ought I to start a law-suit with a person whose name I won’t mention?”

But he, likewise, got nonsense for an answer: “Count the teeth in your mouth.”

One day Tikhon Ilitch, when he glanced into the kitchen, saw his wife beside the cradle in which lay the cook’s baby. A speckled chicken which was wandering along the window ledge, pecking and catching flies, tapped the glass with its beak; but she sat there on the sleeping-board and, while she rocked the cradle, sang in a pitiful quaver:

And Tikhon Ilitch’s face underwent such a change at that moment that Nastasya Petrovna, as she glanced at him, experienced no confusion, felt no fear, but only fell a-weeping and, brushing away her tears, said softly: “Take me away, for Christ’s dear sake, to the Holy Man.”

And Tikhon Ilitch took her to Zadonsk. But as he went he was thinking in his heart that God would certainly chastise him because, in the bustle and cares of life, he went to church only for the service on Easter Day, and otherwise lived as if he were a Tatar. Sacrilegious thoughts also wormed their way into his head. He kept comparing himself to the parents of the Saints, who likewise had long remained childless. This was not clever—but he had long since come to perceive that there dwelt within him some one who was more stupid than himself. Before his departure he had received a letter from Mount Athos: “Most God-loving Benefactor, Tikhon Ilitch! Peace be unto you, and salvation, the blessing of the Lord and the honourable Protection of the All-Sung Mother of God, from her earthly portion, the holy Mount Athos! I have had the happiness of hearing about your good works, and that with love you apportion your mite for the building and adornment of God’s temples and monastic cells. With the years my hovel has reached such a dilapidated condition....” And Tikhon Ilitch sent a ten-ruble banknote to be used for repairing the hovel. The time was long past when he had believed, with ingenuous pride, that rumours concerning him had actually reached as far as Mount Athos, and he knew well enough that far too many hovels on Mount Athos had become dilapidated. Nevertheless, he sent the money.