"First Love" from "First Love and Other Stories" by Ivan Turgenev, (1860) Первая любовь

FIRST LOVE 

The guests had long since departed. The clock struck half-past twelve.
There remained in the room only the host, Sergyéi Nikoláevitch, and
Vladímir Petróvitch.

The host rang and ordered the remains of the supper to be removed.--“So
then, the matter is settled,”--he said, ensconcing himself more deeply
in his arm-chair, and lighting a cigar:--“each of us is to narrate the
history of his first love. ’Tis your turn, Sergyéi Nikoláevitch.”

Sergyéi Nikoláevitch, a rather corpulent man, with a plump, fair-skinned
face, first looked at the host, then raised his eyes to the ceiling.--“I
had no first love,”--he began at last:--“I began straight off with the
second.”

“How was that?”

“Very simply. I was eighteen years of age when, for the first time, I
dangled after a very charming young lady; but I courted her as though it
were no new thing to me: exactly as I courted others afterward. To tell
the truth, I fell in love, for the first and last time, at the age of
six, with my nurse;--but that is a very long time ago. The details of
our relations have been erased from my memory; but even if I remembered
them, who would be interested in them?”

“Then what are we to do?”--began the host.--“There was nothing very
startling about my first love either; I never fell in love with any one
before Anna Ivánovna, now my wife; and everything ran as though on oil
with us; our fathers made up the match, we very promptly fell in love
with each other, and entered the bonds of matrimony without delay. My
story can be told in two words. I must confess, gentlemen, that in
raising the question of first love, I set my hopes on you, I will not
say old, but yet no longer young bachelors. Will not you divert us with
something, Vladímir Petróvitch?”

“My first love belongs, as a matter of fact, not altogether to the
ordinary category,”--replied, with a slight hesitation, Vladímir
Petróvitch, a man of forty, whose black hair was sprinkled with grey.

“Ah!”--said the host and Sergyéi Nikoláevitch in one breath.--“So much
the better.... Tell us.”

“As you like ... or no: I will not narrate; I am no great hand at
telling a story; it turns out dry and short, or long-drawn-out and
artificial. But if you will permit me, I will write down all that I
remember in a note-book, and will read it aloud to you.”

At first the friends would not consent, but Vladímir Petróvitch
insisted on having his own way. A fortnight later they came together
again, and Vladímir Sergyéitch kept his promise.

This is what his note-book contained.


I

I was sixteen years old at the time. The affair took place in the summer
of 1833.

I was living in Moscow, in my parents’ house. They had hired a villa
near the Kalúga barrier, opposite the Neskútchny Park.[2]--I was
preparing for the university, but was working very little and was not in
a hurry.

No one restricted my freedom. I had done whatever I pleased ever since I
had parted with my last French governor, who was utterly unable to
reconcile himself to the thought that he had fallen “like a bomb”
(_comme une bombe_) into Russia, and with a stubborn expression on his
face, wallowed in bed for whole days at a time. My father treated me in
an indifferently-affectionate way; my mother paid hardly any attention
to me, although she had no children except me: other cares engrossed
her. My father, still a young man and very handsome, had married her
from calculation; she was ten years older than he. My mother led a
melancholy life: she was incessantly in a state of agitation, jealousy,
and wrath--but not in the presence of my father; she was very much
afraid of him, and he maintained a stern, cold, and distant manner.... I
have never seen a man more exquisitely calm, self-confident, and
self-controlled.

I shall never forget the first weeks I spent at the villa. The weather
was magnificent; we had left town the ninth of May, on St. Nicholas’s
day. I rambled,--sometimes in the garden of our villa, sometimes in
Neskútchny Park, sometimes beyond the city barriers; I took with me some
book or other,--a course of Kaidánoff,--but rarely opened it, and
chiefly recited aloud poems, of which I knew a great many by heart. The
blood was fermenting in me, and my heart was aching--so sweetly and
absurdly; I was always waiting for something, shrinking at something,
and wondering at everything, and was all ready for anything at a
moment’s notice. My fancy was beginning to play, and hovered swiftly
ever around the selfsame image, as martins hover round a belfry at
sunset. But even athwart my tears and athwart the melancholy, inspired
now by a melodious verse, now by the beauty of the evening, there peered
forth, like grass in springtime, the joyous sensation of young, bubbling
life.

I had a saddle-horse; I was in the habit of saddling it myself, and
when I rode off alone as far as possible, in some direction, launching
out at a gallop and fancying myself a knight at a tourney--how blithely
the wind whistled in my ears!--Or, turning my face skyward, I welcomed
its beaming light and azure into my open soul.

I remember, at that time, the image of woman, the phantom of woman’s
love, almost never entered my mind in clearly-defined outlines; but in
everything I thought, in everything I felt, there lay hidden the
half-conscious, shamefaced presentiment of something new, inexpressibly
sweet, feminine....

This presentiment, this expectation permeated my whole being; I breathed
it, it coursed through my veins in every drop of blood ... it was fated
to be speedily realised.

Our villa consisted of a wooden manor-house with columns, and two tiny
outlying wings; in the wing to the left a tiny factory of cheap
wall-papers was installed.... More than once I went thither to watch how
half a score of gaunt, dishevelled young fellows in dirty smocks and
with tipsy faces were incessantly galloping about at the wooden levers
which jammed down the square blocks of the press, and in that manner, by
the weight of their puny bodies, printed the motley-hued patterns of the
wall-papers. The wing on the right stood empty and was for rent. One
day--three weeks after the ninth of May--the shutters on the windows of
this wing were opened, and women’s faces made their appearance in them;
some family or other had moved into it. I remember how, that same day at
dinner, my mother inquired of the butler who our new neighbours were,
and on hearing the name of Princess Zasyékin, said at first, not without
some respect:--“Ah! a Princess” ... and then she added:--“She must be
some poor person!”

“They came in three hired carriages, ma’am,”--remarked the butler, as he
respectfully presented a dish. “They have no carriage of their own,
ma’am, and their furniture is of the very plainest sort.”

“Yes,”--returned my mother,--“and nevertheless, it is better so.”

My father shot a cold glance at her; she subsided into silence.

As a matter of fact, Princess Zasyékin could not be a wealthy woman: the
wing she had hired was so old and tiny and low-roofed that people in the
least well-to-do would not have been willing to inhabit it.--However, I
let this go in at one ear and out at the other. The princely title had
little effect on me: I had recently been reading Schiller’s “The
Brigands.”


II

I had a habit of prowling about our garden every evening, gun in hand,
and standing guard against the crows.--I had long cherished a hatred for
those wary, rapacious and crafty birds. On the day of which I have been
speaking, I went into the garden as usual, and, after having fruitlessly
made the round of all the alleys (the crows recognised me from afar, and
merely cawed spasmodically at a distance), I accidentally approached the
low fence which separated _our_ territory from the narrow strip of
garden extending behind the right-hand wing and appertaining to it. I
was walking along with drooping head. Suddenly I heard voices: I glanced
over the fence--and was petrified.... A strange spectacle presented
itself to me.

A few paces distant from me, on a grass-plot between green
raspberry-bushes, stood a tall, graceful young girl, in a striped, pink
frock and with a white kerchief on her head; around her pressed four
young men, and she was tapping them in turn on the brow with those small
grey flowers, the name of which I do not know, but which are familiar to
children; these little flowers form tiny sacs, and burst with a pop when
they are struck against anything hard. The young men offered their
foreheads to her so willingly, and in the girl’s movements (I saw her
form in profile) there was something so bewitching, caressing, mocking,
and charming, that I almost cried aloud in wonder and pleasure; and I
believe I would have given everything in the world if those lovely
little fingers had only consented to tap me on the brow. My gun slid
down on the grass, I forgot everything, I devoured with my eyes that
slender waist, and the neck and the beautiful arms, and the slightly
ruffled fair hair, the intelligent eyes and those lashes, and the
delicate cheek beneath them....

“Young man, hey there, young man!”--suddenly spoke up a voice near
me:--“Is it permissible to stare like that at strange young ladies?”

I trembled all over, I was stupefied.... Beside me, on the other side of
the fence, stood a man with closely-clipped black hair, gazing
ironically at me. At that same moment, the young girl turned toward
me.... I beheld huge grey eyes in a mobile, animated face--and this
whole face suddenly began to quiver, and to laugh, and the white teeth
gleamed from it, the brows elevated themselves in an amusing way.... I
flushed, picked up my gun from the ground, and, pursued by ringing but
not malicious laughter, I ran to my own room, flung myself on the bed,
and covered my face with my hands. My heart was fairly leaping within
me; I felt very much ashamed and very merry: I experienced an
unprecedented emotion. 

"Byezhin Prairie" by Ivan Turgenev, from “A Sportsman's Sketches” (1852) – (Записки охотника)

Ivan Turgenev hunting (1879) by Nikolai Dmitriev-Orenburgsky (private collection)

Byezhin Prairie

It was a glorious July day, one of those days which only come after many days of fine weather. From earliest morning the sky is clear; the sunrise does not glow with fire; it is suffused with a soft roseate flush. The sun, not fiery, not red-hot as in time of stifling drought, not dull purple as before a storm, but with a bright and genial radiance, rises peacefully behind a long and narrow cloud, shines out freshly, and plunges again into its lilac mist. The delicate upper edge of the strip of cloud flashes in little gleaming snakes; their brilliance is like polished silver. But, lo! the dancing rays flash forth again, and in solemn joy, as though flying upward, rises the mighty orb. About mid-day there is wont to be, high up in the sky, a multitude of rounded clouds, golden-grey, with soft white edges. Like islands scattered over an overflowing river, that bathes them in its unbroken reaches of deep transparent blue, they scarcely stir; farther down the heavens they are in movement, packing closer; now there is no blue to be seen between them, but they are themselves almost as blue as the sky, filled full with light and heat. The colour of the horizon, a faint pale lilac, does not change all day, and is the same all round; nowhere is there storm gathering and darkening; only somewhere rays of bluish colour stretch down from the sky; it is a sprinkling of scarce- perceptible rain.

In the evening these clouds disappear; the last of them, blackish and undefined as smoke, lie streaked with pink, facing the setting sun; in the place where it has gone down, as calmly as it rose, a crimson glow lingers long over the darkening earth, and, softly flashing like a candle carried carelessly, the evening star flickers in the sky. On such days all the colours are softened, bright but not glaring; everything is suffused with a kind of touching tenderness. On such days the heat is sometimes very great; often it is even 'steaming' on the slopes of the fields, but a wind dispels this growing sultriness, and whirling eddies of dust--sure sign of settled, fine weather--move along the roads and across the fields in high white columns. In the pure dry air there is a scent of wormwood, rye in blossom, and buckwheat; even an hour before nightfall there is no moisture in the air. It is for such weather that the farmer longs, for harvesting his wheat....

On just such a day I was once out grouse-shooting in the Tchern district of the province of Tula. I started and shot a fair amount of game; my full game-bag cut my shoulder mercilessly; but already the evening glow had faded, and the cool shades of twilight were beginning to grow thicker, and to spread across the sky, which was still bright, though no longer lighted up by the rays of the setting sun, when I at last decided to turn back homewards. With swift steps I passed through the long 'square' of underwoods, clambered up a hill, and instead of the familiar plain I expected to see, with the oakwood on the right and the little white church in the distance, I saw before me a scene completely different, and quite new to me. A narrow valley lay at my feet, and directly facing me a dense wood of aspen-trees rose up like a thick wall. I stood still in perplexity, looked round me.... 'Aha!' I thought, 'I have somehow come wrong; I kept too much to the right,' and surprised at my own mistake, I rapidly descended the hill. I was at once plunged into a disagreeable clinging mist, exactly as though I had gone down into a cellar; the thick high grass at the bottom of the valley, all drenched with dew, was white like a smooth tablecloth; one felt afraid somehow to walk on it. I made haste to get on the other side, and walked along beside the aspenwood, bearing to the left. Bats were already hovering over its slumbering tree-tops, mysteriously flitting and quivering across the clear obscure of the sky; a young belated hawk flew in swift, straight course upwards, hastening to its nest. 'Here, directly I get to this corner,' I thought to myself, 'I shall find the road at once; but I have come a mile out of my way!'

I did at last reach the end of the wood, but there was no road of any sort there; some kind of low bushes overgrown with long grass extended far and wide before me; behind them in the far, far distance could be discerned a tract of waste land. I stopped again. 'Well? Where am I?' I began ransacking my brain to recall how and where I had been walking during the day.... 'Ah! but these are the bushes at Parahin,' I cried at last; 'of course! then this must be Sindyev wood. But how did I get here? So far?... Strange! Now I must bear to the right again.'

I went to the right through the bushes. Meantime the night had crept close and grown up like a storm-cloud; it seemed as though, with the mists of evening, darkness was rising up on all sides and flowing down from overhead. I had come upon some sort of little, untrodden, overgrown path; I walked along it, gazing intently before me. Soon all was blackness and silence around--only the quail's cry was heard from time to time. Some small night-bird, flitting noiselessly near the ground on its soft wings, almost flapped against me and skurried away in alarm. I came out on the further side of the bushes, and made my way along a field by the hedge. By now I could hardly make out distant objects; the field showed dimly white around; beyond it rose up a sullen darkness, which seemed moving up closer in huge masses every instant. My steps gave a muffled sound in the air, that grew colder and colder. The pale sky began again to grow blue--but it was the blue of night. The tiny stars glimmered and twinkled in it.

What I had been taking for a wood turned out to be a dark round hillock. 'But where am I, then?' I repeated again aloud, standing still for the third time and looking inquiringly at my spot and tan English dog, Dianka by name, certainly the most intelligent of four-footed creatures. But the most intelligent of four-footed creatures only wagged her tail, blinked her weary eyes dejectedly, and gave me no sensible advice. I felt myself disgraced in her eyes and pushed desperately forward, as though I had suddenly guessed which way I ought to go; I scaled the hill, and found myself in a hollow of no great depth, ploughed round.

A strange sensation came over me at once. This hollow had the form of an almost perfect cauldron, with sloping sides; at the bottom of it were some great white stones standing upright--it seemed as though they had crept there for some secret council--and it was so still and dark in it, so dreary and weird seemed the sky, overhanging it, that my heart sank. Some little animal was whining feebly and piteously among the stones. I made haste to get out again on to the hillock. Till then I had not quite given up all hope of finding the way home; but at this point I finally decided that I was utterly lost, and without any further attempt to make out the surrounding objects, which were almost completely plunged in darkness, I walked straight forward, by the aid of the stars, at random.... For about half-an-hour I walked on in this way, though I could hardly move one leg before the other. It seemed as if I had never been in such a deserted country in my life; nowhere was there the glimmer of a fire, nowhere a sound to be heard. One sloping hillside followed another; fields stretched endlessly upon fields; bushes seemed to spring up out of the earth under my very nose. I kept walking and was just making up my mind to lie down somewhere till morning, when suddenly I found myself on the edge of a horrible precipice.

I quickly drew back my lifted foot, and through the almost opaque darkness I saw far below me a vast plain. A long river skirted it in a semi-circle, turned away from me; its course was marked by the steely reflection of the water still faintly glimmering here and there. The hill on which I found myself terminated abruptly in an almost overhanging precipice, whose gigantic profile stood out black against the dark-blue waste of sky, and directly below me, in the corner formed by this precipice and the plain near the river, which was there a dark, motionless mirror, under the lee of the hill, two fires side by side were smoking and throwing up red flames. People were stirring round them, shadows hovered, and sometimes the front of a little curly head was lighted up by the glow.

I found out at last where I had got to. This plain was well known in our parts under the name of Byezhin Prairie.... But there was no possibility of returning home, especially at night; my legs were sinking under me from weariness. I decided to get down to the fires and to wait for the dawn in the company of these men, whom I took for drovers. I got down successfully, but I had hardly let go of the last branch I had grasped, when suddenly two large shaggy white dogs rushed angrily barking upon me. The sound of ringing boyish voices came from round the fires; two or three boys quickly got up from the ground. I called back in response to their shouts of inquiry. They ran up to me, and at once called off the dogs, who were specially struck by the appearance of my Dianka. I came down to them.

I had been mistaken in taking the figures sitting round the fires for drovers. They were simply peasant boys from a neighbouring village, who were in charge of a drove of horses. In hot summer weather with us they drive the horses out at night to graze in the open country: the flies and gnats would give them no peace in the daytime; they drive out the drove towards evening, and drive them back in the early morning: it's a great treat for the peasant boys. Bare-headed, in old fur-capes, they bestride the most spirited nags, and scurry along with merry cries and hooting and ringing laughter, swinging their arms and legs, and leaping into the air. The fine dust is stirred up in yellow clouds and moves along the road; the tramp of hoofs in unison resounds afar; the horses race along, pricking up their ears; in front of all, with his tail in the air and thistles in his tangled mane, prances some shaggy chestnut, constantly shifting his paces as he goes.

I told the boys I had lost my way, and sat down with them. They asked me where I came from, and then were silent for a little and turned away. Then we talked a little again. I lay down under a bush, whose shoots had been nibbled off, and began to look round. It was a marvellous picture; about the fire a red ring of light quivered and seemed to swoon away in the embrace of a background of darkness; the flame flaring up from time to time cast swift flashes of light beyond the boundary of this circle; a fine tongue of light licked the dry twigs and died away at once; long thin shadows, in their turn breaking in for an instant, danced right up to the very fires; darkness was struggling with light. Sometimes, when the fire burnt low and the circle of light shrank together, suddenly out of the encroaching darkness a horse's head was thrust in, bay, with striped markings or all white, stared with intent blank eyes upon us, nipped hastily the long grass, and drawing back again, vanished instantly. One could only hear it still munching and snorting. From the circle of light it was hard to make out what was going on in the darkness; everything close at hand seemed shut off by an almost black curtain; but farther away hills and forests were dimly visible in long blurs upon the horizon.

The dark unclouded sky stood, inconceivably immense, triumphant, above us in all its mysterious majesty. One felt a sweet oppression at one's heart, breathing in that peculiar, overpowering, yet fresh fragrance-- the fragrance of a summer night in Russia. Scarcely a sound was to be heard around.... Only at times, in the river near, the sudden splash of a big fish leaping, and the faint rustle of a reed on the bank, swaying lightly as the ripples reached it ... the fires alone kept up a subdued crackling.

The boys sat round them: there too sat the two dogs, who had been so eager to devour me. They could not for long after reconcile themselves to my presence, and, drowsily blinking and staring into the fire, they growled now and then with an unwonted sense of their own dignity; first they growled, and then whined a little, as though deploring the impossibility of carrying out their desires. There were altogether five boys: Fedya, Pavlusha, Ilyusha, Kostya and Vanya. (From their talk I learnt their names, and I intend now to introduce them to the reader.)

"The Diary of a Superfluous Man," by Ivan Turgenev, from "The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories" (1850). Russian: «Дневник лишнего человека».

Portrait of Iván Sergéyevich Turgénev,  by Ilya Repin, 1874.

THE DIARY OF A SUPERFLUOUS MAN 

Ivan Turgenev. Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett

VILLAGE OF SHEEP'S SPRINGS, _March_ 20, 18--.

The doctor has just left me. At last I have got at something definite!
For all his cunning, he had to speak out at last. Yes, I am soon, very
soon, to die. The frozen rivers will break up, and with the last snow I
shall, most likely, swim away ... whither? God knows! To the ocean too.
Well, well, since one must die, one may as well die in the spring. But
isn't it absurd to begin a diary a fortnight, perhaps, before death?
What does it matter? And by how much are fourteen days less than
fourteen years, fourteen centuries? Beside eternity, they say, all is
nothingness--yes, but in that case eternity, too, is nothing. I see I
am letting myself drop into metaphysics; that's a bad sign--am I not
rather faint-hearted, perchance? I had better begin a description of
some sort. It's damp and windy out of doors.

I'm forbidden to go out. What can I write about, then? No decent man
talks of his maladies; to write a novel is not in my line; reflections
on elevated topics are beyond me; descriptions of the life going on
around me could not even interest me; while I am weary of doing
nothing, and too lazy to read. Ah, I have it, I will write the story of
all my life for myself. A first-rate idea! Just before death it is a
suitable thing to do, and can be of no harm to any one. I will begin.

I was born thirty years ago, the son of fairly well-to-do landowners.
My father had a passion for gambling; my mother was a woman of
character ... a very virtuous woman. Only, I have known no woman whose
moral excellence was less productive of happiness. She was crushed
beneath the weight of her own virtues, and was a source of misery to
every one, from herself upwards. In all the fifty years of her life,
she never once took rest, or sat with her hands in her lap; she was for
ever fussing and bustling about like an ant, and to absolutely no good
purpose, which cannot be said of the ant. The worm of restlessness
fretted her night and day. Only once I saw her perfectly tranquil, and
that was the day after her death, in her coffin. Looking at her, it
positively seemed to me that her face wore an expression of subdued
amazement; with the half-open lips, the sunken cheeks, and
meekly-staring eyes, it seemed expressing, all over, the words, 'How
good to be at rest!' Yes, it is good, good to be rid, at last, of the
wearing sense of life, of the persistent, restless consciousness of
existence! But that's neither here nor there.

I was brought up badly and not happily. My father and mother both loved
me; but that made things no better for me. My father was not, even in
his own house, of the slightest authority or consequence, being a man
openly abandoned to a shameful and ruinous vice; he was conscious of
his degradation, and not having the strength of will to give up his
darling passion, he tried at least, by his invariably amiable and
humble demeanour and his unswerving submissiveness, to win the
condescending consideration of his exemplary wife. My mother certainly
did bear her trial with the superb and majestic long-suffering of
virtue, in which there is so much of egoistic pride. She never
reproached my father for anything, gave him her last penny, and paid
his debts without a word. He exalted her as a paragon to her face and
behind her back, but did not like to be at home, and caressed me by
stealth, as though he were afraid of contaminating me by his presence.
But at such times his distorted features were full of such kindness,
the nervous grin on his lips was replaced by such a touching smile, and
his brown eyes, encircled by fine wrinkles, shone with such love, that
I could not help pressing my cheek to his, which was wet and warm with
tears. I wiped away those tears with my handkerchief, and they flowed
again without effort, like water from a brimming glass. I fell to
crying, too, and he comforted me, stroking my back and kissing me all
over my face with his quivering lips. Even now, more than twenty years
after his death, when I think of my poor father, dumb sobs rise into my
throat, and my heart beats as hotly and bitterly and aches with as
poignant a pity as if it had long to go on beating, as if there were
anything to be sorry for!

My mother's behaviour to me, on the contrary, was always the same,
kind, but cold. In children's books one often comes across such
mothers, sermonising and just. She loved me, but I did not love her.
Yes! I fought shy of my virtuous mother, and passionately loved my
vicious father.

But enough for to-day. It's a beginning, and as for the end, whatever
it may be, I needn't trouble my head about it. That's for my illness to
see to.


_March_ 21.

To-day it is marvellous weather. Warm, bright; the sunshine frolicking
gaily on the melting snow; everything shining, steaming, dripping; the
sparrows chattering like mad things about the drenched, dark hedges.

Sweetly and terribly, too, the moist air frets my sick chest. Spring,
spring is coming! I sit at the window and look across the river into
the open country. O nature! nature! I love thee so, but I came forth
from thy womb good for nothing--not fit even for life. There goes a
cock-sparrow, hopping along with outspread wings; he chirrups, and
every note, every ruffled feather on his little body, is breathing with
health and strength....

What follows from that? Nothing. He is well and has a right to chirrup
and ruffle his wings; but I am ill and must die--that's all. It's not
worth while to say more about it. And tearful invocations to nature are
mortally absurd. Let us get back to my story.

I was brought up, as I have said, very badly and not happily. I had no
brothers or sisters. I was educated at home. And, indeed, what would my
mother have had to occupy her, if I had been sent to a boarding-school
or a government college? That's what children are for--that their
parents may not be bored. We lived for the most part in the country,
and sometimes went to Moscow. I had tutors and teachers, as a matter of
course; one, in particular, has remained in my memory, a dried-up,
tearful German, Rickmann, an exceptionally mournful creature, cruelly
maltreated by destiny, and fruitlessly consumed by an intense pining
for his far-off fatherland. Sometimes, near the stove, in the fearful
stuffiness of the close ante-room, full of the sour smell of stale
kvas, my unshaved man-nurse, Vassily, nicknamed Goose, would sit,
playing cards with the coachman, Potap, in a new sheepskin, white as
foam, and superb tarred boots, while in the next room Rickmann would
sing, behind the partition--

    Herz, mein Herz, warum so traurig?
    Was bekümmert dich so sehr?
    'Sist ja schön im fremden Lande--
    Herz, mein Herz--was willst du mehr?'

After my father's death we moved to Moscow for good. I was twelve years
old. My father died in the night from a stroke. I shall never forget
that night. I was sleeping soundly, as children generally do; but I
remember, even in my sleep, I was aware of a heavy gasping noise at
regular intervals. Suddenly I felt some one taking hold of my shoulder
and poking me. I opened my eyes and saw my nurse. 'What is it?' 'Come
along, come along, Alexey Mihalitch is dying.' ... I was out of bed and
away like a mad thing into his bedroom. I looked: my father was lying
with his head thrown back, all red, and gasping fearfully. The servants
were crowding round the door with terrified faces; in the hall some one
was asking in a thick voice: 'Have they sent for the doctor?' In the
yard outside, a horse was being led from the stable, the gates were
creaking, a tallow candle was burning in the room on the floor, my
mother was there, terribly upset, but not oblivious of the proprieties,
nor of her own dignity. I flung myself on my father's bosom, and hugged
him, faltering: 'Papa, papa...' He lay motionless, screwing up his eyes
in a strange way. I looked into his face--an unendurable horror caught
my breath; I shrieked with terror, like a roughly captured bird--they
picked me up and carried me away. Only the day before, as though aware
his death was at hand, he had caressed me so passionately and
despondently.

A sleepy, unkempt doctor, smelling strongly of spirits, was brought. My
father died under his lancet, and the next day, utterly stupefied by
grief, I stood with a candle in my hands before a table, on which lay
the dead man, and listened senselessly to the bass sing-song of the
deacon, interrupted from time to time by the weak voice of the priest.
The tears kept streaming over my cheeks, my lips, my collar, my
shirt-front. I was dissolved in tears; I watched persistently, I
watched intently, my father's rigid face, as though I expected
something of him; while my mother slowly bowed down to the ground,
slowly rose again, and pressed her fingers firmly to her forehead, her
shoulders, and her chest, as she crossed herself. I had not a single
idea in my head; I was utterly numb, but I felt something terrible was
happening to me.... Death looked me in the face that day and took note
of me.

We moved to Moscow after my father's death for a very simple cause: all
our estate was sold up by auction for debts--that is, absolutely all,
except one little village, the one in which I am at this moment living
out my magnificent existence. I must admit that, in spite of my youth
at the time, I grieved over the sale of our home, or rather, in
reality, I grieved over our garden. Almost my only bright memories are
associated with our garden. It was there that one mild spring evening I
buried my best friend, an old bob-tailed, crook-pawed dog, Trix. It was
there that, hidden in the long grass, I used to eat stolen
apples--sweet, red, Novgorod apples they were. There, too, I saw for
the first time, among the ripe raspberry bushes, the housemaid Klavdia,
who, in spite of her turned-up nose and habit of giggling in her
kerchief, aroused such a tender passion in me that I could hardly
breathe, and stood faint and tongue-tied in her presence; and once at
Easter, when it came to her turn to kiss my seignorial hand, I almost
flung myself at her feet to kiss her down-trodden goat-skin slippers.
My God! Can all that be twenty years ago? It seems not long ago that I
used to ride on my shaggy chestnut pony along the old fence of our
garden, and, standing up in the stirrups, used to pick the two-coloured
poplar leaves. While a man is living he is not conscious of his own
life; it becomes audible to him, like a sound, after the lapse of time.

Oh, my garden, oh, the tangled paths by the tiny pond! Oh, the little
sandy spot below the tumbledown dike, where I used to catch gudgeons!
And you tall birch-trees, with long hanging branches, from beyond which
came floating a peasant's mournful song, broken by the uneven jolting
of the cart, I send you my last farewell!... On parting with life, to
you alone I stretch out my hands. Would I might once more inhale the
fresh, bitter fragrance of the wormwood, the sweet scent of the mown
buckwheat in the fields of my native place! Would I might once more
hear far away the modest tinkle of the cracked bell of our parish
church; once more lie in the cool shade under the oak sapling on the
slope of the familiar ravine; once more watch the moving track of the
wind, flitting, a dark wave over the golden grass of our meadow!... Ah,
what's the good of all this? But I can't go on to-day. Enough till
to-morrow.


_March_ 22.

To-day it's cold and overcast again. Such weather is a great deal more
suitable. It's more in harmony with my task. Yesterday, quite
inappropriately, stirred up a multitude of useless emotions and
memories within me. This shall not occur again. Sentimental out-breaks
are like liquorice; when first you suck it, it's not bad, but
afterwards it leaves a very nasty taste in the mouth. I will set to
work simply and serenely to tell the story of my life. And so, we moved
to Moscow....

But it occurs to me, is it really worth while to tell the story of my
life?

"Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories," by Ivan Turgenev (1871). Full text, translated in English by Constance Garnett

 
Portarait of Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

Turning from side to side I stretched out my hands ... My finger hit 
one of the beams of the wall. It emitted a faint but resounding, and as 
it were, prolonged note ... I must have struck a hollow place.
I tapped again ... this time on purpose. The same sound was repeated. 

I knocked again ...' 

THE WATCH

AN OLD MAN'S STORY

I

I will tell you my adventures with a watch. It is a curious story.

It happened at the very beginning of this century, in 1801. I had just
reached my sixteenth year. I was living at Ryazan in a little wooden
house not far from the bank of the river Oka with my father, my aunt
and my cousin; my mother I do not remember; she died three years after
her marriage; my father had no other children. His name was Porfiry
Petrovitch. He was a quiet man, sickly and unattractive in appearance;
he was employed in some sort of legal and--other--business. In old
days such were called attorneys, sharpers, nettle-seeds; he called
himself a lawyer. Our domestic life was presided over by his sister,
my aunt, an old maiden lady of fifty; my father, too, had passed his
fourth decade. My aunt was very pious, or, to speak bluntly, she was a
canting hypocrite and a chattering magpie, who poked her nose into
everything; and, indeed, she had not a kind heart like my father. We
were not badly off, but had nothing to spare. My father had a brother
called Yegor; but he had been sent to Siberia in the year 1797 for
some "seditious acts and Jacobin tendencies" (those were the words of
the accusation).

Yegor's son David, my cousin, was left on my father's hands and lived
with us. He was only one year older than I; but I respected him and
obeyed him as though he were quite grown up. He was a sensible fellow
with character; in appearance, thick-set and broad-shouldered with a
square face covered with freckles, with red hair, small grey eyes,
thick lips, a short nose, and short fingers--a sturdy lad, in
fact--and strong for his age! My aunt could not endure him; my father
was positively afraid of him ... or perhaps he felt himself to blame
towards him. There was a rumour that, if my father had not given his
brother away, David's father would not have been sent to Siberia. We
were both at the high school and in the same class and both fairly
high up in it; I was, indeed, a little better at my lessons than
David. I had a good memory but boys--as we all know!--do not think
much of such superiority, and David remained my leader.

II

My name--you know--is Alexey. I was born on the seventh of March and
my name-day is the seventeenth. In accordance with the old-fashioned
custom, I was given the name of the saint whose festival fell on the
tenth day after my birth. My godfather was a certain Anastasy
Anastasyevitch Putchkov, or more exactly Nastasey Nastasyeitch, for
that was what everyone called him. He was a terribly shifty,
pettifogging knave and bribe-taker--a thoroughly bad man; he had been
turned out of the provincial treasury and had had to stand his trial
on more than one occasion; he was often of use to my father.... They
used to "do business" together. In appearance he was a round, podgy
figure; and his face was like a fox's with a nose like an owl's. His
eyes were brown, bright, also like a fox's, and he was always moving
them, those eyes, to right and to left, and he twitched his nose, too,
as though he were sniffing the air. He wore shoes without heels, and
wore powder every day, which was looked upon as very exceptional in
the provinces. He used to declare that he could not go without powder
as he had to associate with generals and their ladies. Well, my
name-day had come. Nastasey Nastasyeitch came to the house and said:

"I have never made you a present up to now, godson, but to make up for
that, look what a fine thing I have brought you to-day."

And he took out of his pocket a silver watch, a regular turnip, with a
rose tree engraved on the face and a brass chain. I was overwhelmed
with delight, while my aunt, Pelageya Petrovna, shouted at the top of
her voice:

"Kiss his hand, kiss his hand, dirty brat!"

I proceeded to kiss my godfather's hand, while my aunt went piping on:

"Oh, Nastasey Nastasyeitch! Why do you spoil him like this? How can he
take care of a watch? He will be sure to drop it, break it, or spoil
it."

My father walked in, looked at the watch, thanked Nastasey
Nastasyeitch--somewhat carelessly, and invited him to his study. And I
heard my father say, as though to himself:

"If you think to get off _with that_, my man...." But I could not
stay still. I put on the watch and rushed headlong to show my present
to David.

III

David took the watch, opened it and examined it attentively. He had
great mechanical ability; he liked having to do with iron, copper, and
metals of all sorts; he had provided himself with various instruments,
and it was nothing for him to mend or even to make a screw, a key or
anything of that kind.

David turned the watch about in his hands and muttering through his
teeth (he was not talkative as a rule):

"Oh ... poor ..." added, "where did you get it?"

I told him that my godfather had given it me.

David turned his little grey eyes upon me:

"Nastasey?"

"Yes, Nastasey Nastasyeitch."

David laid the watch on the table and walked away without a word.

"Do you like it?" I asked.

"Well, it isn't that.... But if I were you, I would not take any sort
of present from Nastasey."

"Why?"

"Because he is a contemptible person; and you ought not to be under an
obligation to a contemptible person. And to say thank you to him, too.
I suppose you kissed his hand?"

"Yes, Aunt made me."

David grinned--a peculiar grin--to himself. That was his way. He never
laughed aloud; he considered laughter a sign of feebleness.

David's words, his silent grin, wounded me deeply. "So he inwardly
despises me," I thought. "So I, too, am contemptible in his eyes. He
would never have stooped to this himself! He would not have accepted
presents from Nastasey. But what am I to do now?"

Give back the watch? Impossible!

I did try to talk to David, to ask his advice. He told me that he
never gave advice to anyone and that I had better do as I thought
best. As I thought best!! I remember I did not sleep all night
afterwards: I was in agonies of indecision. I was sorry to lose the
watch--I had laid it on the little table beside my bed; its ticking
was so pleasant and amusing ... but to feel that David despised me
(yes, it was useless to deceive myself, he did despise me) ... that
seemed to me unbearable. Towards morning a determination had taken
shape in me ... I wept, it is true--but I fell asleep upon it, and as
soon as I woke up, I dressed in haste and ran out into the street. I
had made up my mind to give my watch to the first poor person I met.

IV

I had not run far from home when I hit upon what I was looking for. I
came across a barelegged boy of ten, a ragged urchin, who was often
hanging about near our house. I dashed up to him at once and, without
giving him or myself time to recover, offered him my watch.

The boy stared at me round-eyed, put one hand before his mouth, as
though he were afraid of being scalded--and held out the other.

"Take it, take it," I muttered, "it's mine, I give it you, you can
sell it, and buy yourself ... something you want.... Good-bye."

I thrust the watch into his hand--and went home at a gallop. Stopping
for a moment at the door of our common bedroom to recover my breath, I
went up to David who had just finished dressing and was combing his
hair.

"Do you know what, David?" I said in as unconcerned a tone as I could,
"I have given away Nastasey's watch."

David looked at me and passed the brush over his temples.

"Yes," I added in the same businesslike voice, "I have given it away.
There is a very poor boy, a beggar, you know, so I have given it to
him."

David put down the brush on the washing-stand.

"He can buy something useful," I went on, "with the money he can get
for it. Anyway, he will get something for it."

I paused.

"Well," David said at last, "that's a good thing," and he went off to
the schoolroom. I followed him.

"And if they ask you what you have done with it?" he said, turning to
me.

"I shall tell them I've lost it," I answered carelessly.

No more was said about the watch between us that day; but I had the
feeling that David not only approved of what I had done but ... was to
some extent surprised by it. He really was!

V

Two days more passed. It happened that no one in the house thought of
the watch. My father was taken up with a very serious unpleasantness
with one of his clients; he had no attention to spare for me or my
watch. I, on the other hand, thought of it without ceasing! Even the
approval ... the presumed approval of David did not quite comfort me.
He did not show it in any special way: the only thing he said, and
that casually, was that he hadn't expected such recklessness of me.
Certainly I was a loser by my sacrifice: it was not counter-balanced
by the gratification afforded me by my vanity.

And what is more, as ill-luck would have it, another schoolfellow of
ours, the son of the town doctor, must needs turn up and begin
boasting of a new watch, a present from his grandmother, and not even
a silver, but a pinch-back one....

I could not bear it, at last, and, without a word to anyone, slipped
out of the house and proceeded to hunt for the beggar boy to whom I
had given my watch.

I soon found him; he was playing knucklebones in the churchyard with
some other boys.

I called him aside--and, breathless and stammering, told him that my
family were angry with me for having given away the watch--and that if
he would consent to give it back to me I would gladly pay him for
it.... To be ready for any emergency, I had brought with me an
old-fashioned rouble of the reign of Elizabeth, which represented the
whole of my fortune.

"But I haven't got it, your watch," answered the boy in an angry and
tearful voice; "my father saw it and took it away from me; and he was
for thrashing me, too. 'You must have stolen it from somewhere,' he
said. 'What fool is going to make you a present of a watch?'"

"And who is your father?"

"My father? Trofimitch."

"But what is he? What's his trade?"

"He is an old soldier, a sergeant. And he has no trade at all. He
mends old shoes, he re-soles them. That's all his trade. That's what
he lives by."

"Where do you live? Take me to him."

"To be sure I will. You tell my father that you gave me the watch. For
he keeps pitching into me, and calling me a thief! And my mother, too.
'Who is it you are taking after,' she says, 'to be a thief?'"

I set off with the boy to his home. They lived in a smoky hut in the
back-yard of a factory, which had long ago been burnt down and not
rebuilt. We found both Trofimitch and his wife at home. The discharged
sergeant was a tall old man, erect and sinewy, with yellowish grey
whiskers, an unshaven chin and a perfect network of wrinkles on his
cheeks and forehead. His wife looked older than he. Her red eyes,
which looked buried in her unhealthily puffy face, kept blinking
dejectedly. Some sort of dark rags hung about them by way of clothes.

I explained to Trofimitch what I wanted and why I had come. He
listened to me in silence without once winking or moving from me his
stupid and strained--typically soldierly--eyes.

"Whims and fancies!" he brought out at last in a husky, toothless
bass. "Is that the way gentlemen behave? And if Petka really did not
steal the watch--then I'll give him one for that! To teach him not to
play the fool with little gentlemen! And if he did steal it, then I
would give it to him in a very different style, whack, whack, whack!
With the flat of a sword; in horseguard's fashion! No need to think
twice about it! What's the meaning of it? Eh? Go for them with sabres!
Here's a nice business! Tfoo!"

This last interjection Trofimitch pronounced in a falsetto. He was
obviously perplexed.

"If you are willing to restore the watch to me," I explained to him--I
did not dare to address him familiarly in spite of his being a
soldier--"I will with pleasure pay you this rouble here. The watch is
not worth more, I imagine."

"Well!" growled Trofimitch, still amazed and, from old habit,
devouring me with his eyes as though I were his superior officer.
"It's a queer business, eh? Well, there it is, no understanding it.
Ulyana, hold your tongue!" he snapped out at his wife who was opening
her mouth. "Here's the watch," he added, opening the table drawer; "if
it really is yours, take it by all means; but what's the rouble for?
Eh?"

"Take the rouble, Trofimitch, you senseless man," wailed his wife. "You
have gone crazy in your old age! We have not a half-rouble between us,
and then you stand on your dignity! It was no good their cutting off
your pigtail, you are a regular old woman just the same! How can you
go on like that--when you know nothing about it? ... Take the money,
if you have a fancy to give back the watch!"

"Ulyana, hold your tongue, you dirty slut!" Trofimitch repeated.
"Whoever heard of such a thing, talking away? Eh? The husband is the
head; and yet she talks! Petka, don't budge, I'll kill you.... Here's
the watch!"

Trofimitch held out the watch to me, but did not let go of it.

He pondered, looked down, then fixed the same intent, stupid stare
upon me. Then all at once bawled at the top of his voice:

"Where is it? Where's your rouble?"

"Here it is, here it is," I responded hurriedly and I snatched the
coin out of my pocket.

But he did not take it, he still stared at me. I laid the rouble on
the table. He suddenly brushed it into the drawer, thrust the watch
into my hand and wheeling to the left with a loud stamp, he hissed at
his wife and his son:

"Get along, you low wretches!"

Ulyana muttered something, but I had already dashed out into the yard
and into the street. Thrusting the watch to the very bottom of my
pocket and clutching it tightly in my hand, I hurried home.

VI

I had regained the possession of my watch but it afforded me no
satisfaction whatever. I did not venture to wear it, it was above all
necessary to conceal from David what I had done. What would he think
of me, of my lack of will? I could not even lock up the luckless watch
in a drawer: we had all our drawers in common. I had to hide it,
sometimes on the top of the cupboard, sometimes under my mattress,
sometimes behind the stove.... And yet I did not succeed in
hoodwinking David.

One day I took the watch from under a plank in the floor of our room
and proceeded to rub the silver case with an old chamois leather
glove. David had gone off somewhere in the town; I did not at all
expect him to be back quickly.... Suddenly he was in the doorway.

I was so overcome that I almost dropped the watch, and, utterly
disconcerted, my face painfully flushing crimson, I fell to fumbling
about my waistcoat with it, unable to find my pocket.

David looked at me and, as usual, smiled without speaking.

"What's the matter?" he brought out at last. "You imagined I didn't
know you had your watch again? I saw it the very day you brought it
back."

"I assure you," I began, almost on the point of tears....

David shrugged his shoulders.

"The watch is yours, you are free to do what you like with it."

Saying these cruel words, he went out.

I was overwhelmed with despair. This time there could be no doubt!
David certainly despised me.

I could not leave it so.

"I will show him," I thought, clenching my teeth, and at once with a
firm step I went into the passage, found our page-boy, Yushka, and
presented him with the watch!

Yushka would have refused it, but I declared that if he did not take
the watch from me I would smash it that very minute, trample it under
foot, break it to bits and throw it in the cesspool! He thought a
moment, giggled, and took the watch. I went back to our room and
seeing David reading there, I told him what I had done.

David did not take his eyes off the page and, again shrugging his
shoulder and smiling to himself, repeated that the watch was mine and
that I was free to do what I liked with it.

But it seemed to me that he already despised me a little less.

I was fully persuaded that I should never again expose myself to the
reproach of weakness of character, for the watch, the disgusting
present from my disgusting godfather, had suddenly grown so
distasteful to me that I was quite incapable of understanding how I
could have regretted it, how I could have begged for it back from the
wretched Trofimitch, who had, moreover, the right to think that he had
treated me with generosity.

Several days passed.... I remember that on one of them the great news
reached our town that the Emperor Paul was dead and his son Alexandr,
of whose graciousness and humanity there were such favourable rumours,
had ascended the throne. This news excited David intensely: the
possibility of seeing--of shortly seeing--his father occurred to him
at once. My father was delighted, too.

"They will bring back all the exiles from Siberia now and I expect
brother Yegor will not be forgotten," he kept repeating, rubbing his
hands, coughing and, at the same time, seeming rather nervous.

David and I at once gave up working and going to the high school; we
did not even go for walks but sat in a corner counting and reckoning
in how many months, in how many weeks, in how many days "brother
Yegor" ought to come back and where to write to him and how to go to
meet him and in what way we should begin to live afterwards. "Brother
Yegor" was an architect: David and I decided that he ought to settle
in Moscow and there build big schools for poor people and we would go
to be his assistants. The watch, of course, we had completely
forgotten; besides, David had new cares.... Of them I will speak
later, but the watch was destined to remind us of its existence again.

VII

One morning we had only just finished lunch--I was sitting alone by
the window thinking of my uncle's release--outside there was the steam
and glitter of an April thaw--when all at once my aunt, Pelageya
Petrovna, walked into the room. She was at all times restless and
fidgetty, she spoke in a shrill voice and was always waving her arms
about; on this occasion she simply pounced on me.

"Go along, go to your father at once, sir!" she snapped out. "What
pranks have you been up to, you shameless boy! You will catch it, both
of you. Nastasey Nastasyeitch has shown up all your tricks! Go along,
your father wants you.... Go along this very minute."

Understanding nothing, I followed my aunt, and, as I crossed the
threshold of the drawing-room, I saw my father, striding up and down
and ruffling up his hair, Yushka in tears by the door and, sitting on
a chair in the corner, my godfather, Nastasey Nastasyeitch, with an
expression of peculiar malignancy in his distended nostrils and in his
fiery, slanting eyes.

My father swooped down upon me as soon as I walked in.

"Did you give your watch to Yushka? Tell me!"

I glanced at Yushka.

"Tell me," repeated my father, stamping.

"Yes," I answered, and immediately received a stinging slap in the
face, which afforded my aunt great satisfaction. I heard her gulp, as
though she had swallowed some hot tea. From me my father ran to
Yushka.

"And you, you rascal, ought not to have dared to accept such a
present," he said, pulling him by the hair: "and you sold it, too, you
good-for-nothing boy!"

Yushka, as I learned later had, in the simplicity of his heart, taken
my watch to a neighbouring watchmaker's. The watchmaker had displayed
it in his shop-window; Nastasey Nastasyeitch had seen it, as he passed
by, bought it and brought it along with him.

However, my ordeal and Yushka's did not last long: my father gasped
for breath, and coughed till he choked; indeed, it was not in his
character to be angry long.

"Brother, Porfiry Petrovitch," observed my aunt, as soon as she
noticed not without regret that my father's anger had, so to speak,
flickered out, "don't you worry yourself further: it's not worth
dirtying your hands over. I tell you what I suggest: with the consent
of our honoured friend, Nastasey Nastasyeitch, in consideration of the
base ingratitude of your son--I will take charge of the watch; and
since he has shown by his conduct that he is not worthy to wear it and
does not even understand its value, I will present it in your name to
a person who will be very sensible of your kindness."

"Whom do you mean?" asked my father.

"To Hrisanf Lukitch," my aunt articulated, with slight hesitation.

"To Hrisashka?" asked my father, and with a wave of his hand, he
added: "It's all one to me. You can throw it in the stove, if you
like."

He buttoned up his open vest and went out, writhing from his coughing.

"And you, my good friend, do you agree?" said my aunt, addressing
Nastasey Nastasyeitch.

"I am quite agreeable," responded the latter. During the whole
proceedings he had not stirred and only snorting stealthily and
stealthily rubbing the ends of his fingers, had fixed his foxy eyes by
turns on me, on my father, and on Yushka. We afforded him real
gratification!

My aunt's suggestion revolted me to the depths of my soul. It was not
that I regretted the watch; but the person to whom she proposed to
present it was absolutely hateful to me. This Hrisanf Lukitch (his
surname was Trankvillitatin), a stalwart, robust, lanky divinity
student, was in the habit of coming to our house--goodness knows what
for!--to help the _children_ with their lessons, my aunt asserted;
but he could not help us with our lessons because he had never
learnt anything himself and was as stupid as a horse. He was
rather like a horse altogether: he thudded with his feet as though
they had been hoofs, did not laugh but neighed, opening his jaws till
you could see right down his throat--and he had a long face, a hooked
nose and big, flat jaw-bones; he wore a shaggy frieze, full-skirted
coat, and smelt of raw meat. My aunt idolised him and called him a
good-looking man, a cavalier and even a grenadier. He had a habit of
tapping children on the forehead with the nails of his long fingers,
hard as stones (he used to do it to me when I was younger), and as he
tapped he would chuckle and say with surprise: "How your head
resounds, it must be empty." And this lout was to possess my
watch!--No, indeed, I determined in my own mind as I ran out of the
drawing-room and flung myself on my bed, while my cheek glowed crimson
from the slap I had received and my heart, too, was aglow with the
bitterness of the insult and the thirst for revenge--no, indeed! I
would not allow that cursed Hrisashka to jeer at me.... He would put
on the watch, let the chain hang over his stomach, would neigh with
delight; no, indeed!

"Quite so, but how was it to be done, how to prevent it?"

I determined to steal the watch from my aunt.

VIII

Luckily Trankvillitatin was away from the town at the time: he could
not come to us before the next day; I must take advantage of the
night! My aunt did not lock her bedroom door and, indeed, none of the
keys in the house would turn in the locks; but where would she put the
watch, where would she hide it? She kept it in her pocket till the
evening and even took it out and looked at it more than once; but at
night--where would it be at night?--Well, that was just my work to
find out, I thought, shaking my fists.

I was burning with boldness and terror and joy at the thought of the
approaching crime. I was continually nodding to myself; I knitted my
brows. I whispered: "Wait a bit!" I threatened someone, I was wicked,
I was dangerous ... and I avoided David!--no one, not even he, must
have the slightest suspicion of what I meant to do....

I would act alone and alone I would answer for it!

Slowly the day lagged by, then the evening, at last the night came. I
did nothing; I even tried not to move: one thought was stuck in my
head like a nail. At dinner my father, who was, as I have said,
naturally gentle, and who was a little ashamed of his harshness--boys
of sixteen are not slapped in the face--tried to be affectionate to
me; but I rejected his overtures, not from slowness to forgive, as he
imagined at the time, but simply that I was afraid of my feelings
getting the better of me; I wanted to preserve untouched all the heat
of my vengeance, all the hardness of unalterable determination. I went
to bed very early; but of course I did not sleep and did not even shut
my eyes, but on the contrary opened them wide, though I did pull the
quilt over my head. I did not consider beforehand how to act. I had no
plan of any kind; I only waited till everything should be quiet in the
house. I only took one step: I did not remove my stockings. My aunt's
room was on the second floor. One had to pass through the dining-room
and the hall, go up the stairs, pass along a little passage and
there ... on the right was the door! I must not on any account take
with me a candle or a lantern; in the corner of my aunt's room a little
lamp was always burning before the ikon shrine; I knew that. So I
should be able to see. I still lay with staring eyes and my mouth open
and parched; the blood was throbbing in my temples, in my ears, in my
throat, in my back, all over me! I waited ... but it seemed as though
some demon were mocking me; time passed and passed but still silence
did not reign.

IX

Never, I thought, had David been so late getting to sleep.... David,
the silent David, even began talking to me! Never had they gone on so
long banging, talking, walking about the house! And what could they be
talking about? I wondered; as though they had not had the whole day to
talk in! Sounds outside persisted, too; first a dog barked on a
shrill, obstinate note; then a drunken peasant was making an uproar
somewhere and would not be pacified; then gates kept creaking; then a
wretched cart on racketty wheels kept passing and passing and seeming
as though it would never pass! However, these sounds did not worry me:
on the contrary, I was glad of them; they seemed to distract my
attention. But now at last it seemed as though all were tranquil. Only
the pendulum of our old clock ticked gravely and drowsily in the
dining-room and there was an even drawn-out sound like the hard
breathing of people asleep. I was on the point of getting up, then
again something rustled ... then suddenly sighed, something soft fell
down ... and a whisper glided along the walls.

Or was there nothing of the sort--and was it only imagination mocking
me?

At last all was still. It was the very heart, the very dead of night.
The time had come! Chill with anticipation, I threw off the
bedclothes, let my feet down to the floor, stood up ... one step; a
second.... I stole along, my feet, heavy as though they did not belong
to me, trod feebly and uncertainly. Stay! what was that sound? Someone
sawing, somewhere, or scraping ... or sighing? I listened ... I felt my
cheeks twitching and cold watery tears came into my eyes. Nothing! ...
I stole on again. It was dark but I knew the way. All at once I
stumbled against a chair.... What a bang and how it hurt! It hit me
just on my leg.... I stood stock still. Well, did that wake them? Ah!
here goes! Suddenly I felt bold and even spiteful. On! On! Now the
dining-room was crossed, then the door was groped for and opened at
one swing. The cursed hinge squeaked, bother it! Then I went up the
stairs, one! two! one! two! A step creaked under my foot; I looked at
it spitefully, just as though I could see it. Then I stretched for the
handle of another door. This one made not the slightest sound! It flew
open so easily, as though to say, "Pray walk in." ... And now I was in
the corridor!

In the corridor there was a little window high up under the ceiling, a
faint light filtered in through the dark panes. And in that glimmer of
light I could see our little errand girl lying on the floor on a mat,
both arms behind her tousled head; she was sound asleep, breathing
rapidly and the fatal door was just behind her head. I stepped across
the mat, across the girl ... who opened that door? ... I don't know,
but there I was in my aunt's room. There was the little lamp in one
corner and the bed in the other and my aunt in her cap and night
jacket on the bed with her face towards me. She was asleep, she did
not stir, I could not even hear her breathing. The flame of the little
lamp softly flickered, stirred by the draught of fresh air, and
shadows stirred all over the room, even over the motionless wax-like
yellow face of my aunt....

And there was the watch! It was hanging on a little embroidered
cushion on the wall behind the bed. What luck, only think of it!
Nothing to delay me! But whose steps were those, soft and rapid behind
my back? Oh! no! it was my heart beating! ... I moved my legs
forward.... Good God! something round and rather large pushed against
me below my knee, once and again! I was ready to scream, I was ready
to drop with horror.... A striped cat, our own cat, was standing
before me arching his back and wagging his tail. Then he leapt on the
bed--softly and heavily--turned round and sat without purring, exactly
like a judge; he sat and looked at me with his golden pupils. "Puss,
puss," I whispered, hardly audibly. I bent across my aunt, I had
already snatched the watch. She suddenly sat up and opened her eyelids
wide.... Heavenly Father, what next? ... but her eyelids quivered and
closed and with a faint murmur her head sank on the pillow.

A minute later I was back again in my own room, in my own bed and the
watch was in my hands....

More lightly than a feather I flew back! I was a fine fellow, I was a
thief, I was a hero, I was gasping with delight, I was hot, I was
gleeful--I wanted to wake David at once to tell him all about it--and,
incredible as it sounds, I fell asleep and slept like the dead! At
last I opened my eyes.... It was light in the room, the sun had risen.
Luckily no one was awake yet. I jumped up as though I had been
scalded, woke David and told him all about it. He listened, smiled.
"Do you know what?" he said to me at last, "let's bury the silly watch
in the earth, so that it may never be seen again." I thought his idea
best of all. In a few minutes we were both dressed; we ran out into
the orchard behind our house and under an old apple tree in a deep
hole, hurriedly scooped out in the soft, springy earth with David's
big knife, my godfather's hated present was hidden forever, so that it
never got into the hands of the disgusting Trankvillitatin after all!
We stamped down the hole, strewed rubbish over it and, proud and
happy, unnoticed by anyone, went home again, got into our beds and
slept another hour or two--and such a light and blissful sleep!

X

You can imagine the uproar there was that morning, as soon as my aunt
woke up and missed the watch! Her piercing shriek is ringing in my
ears to this day. "Help! Robbed! Robbed!" she squealed, and alarmed
the whole household. She was furious, while David and I only smiled to
ourselves and sweet was our smile to us. "Everyone, everyone must be
well thrashed!" bawled my aunt. "The watch has been stolen from under
my head, from under my pillow!" We were prepared for anything, we
expected trouble.... But contrary to our expectations we did not get
into trouble at all. My father certainly did fume dreadfully at first,
he even talked of the police; but I suppose he was bored with the
enquiry of the day before and suddenly, to my aunt's indescribable
amazement, he flew out not against us but against her.

"You sicken me worse than a bitter radish, Pelageya Petrovna," he
shouted, "with your watch. I don't want to hear any more about it! It
can't be lost by magic, you say, but what's it to do with me? It may
be magic for all I care! Stolen from you? Well, good luck to it then!
What will Nastasey Nastasyeitch say? Damnation take him, your
Nastasyeitch! I get nothing but annoyances and unpleasantness from
him! Don't dare to worry me again! Do you hear?"

My father slammed the door and went off to his own room. David and I
did not at first understand the allusion in his last words; but
afterwards we found out that my father was just then violently
indignant with my godfather, who had done him out of a profitable job.
So my aunt was left looking a fool. She almost burst with vexation,
but there was no help for it. She had to confine herself to repeating
in a sharp whisper, twisting her mouth in my direction whenever she
passed me, "Thief, thief, robber, scoundrel." My aunt's reproaches
were a source of real enjoyment to me. It was very agreeable, too, as
I crossed the flower-garden, to let my eye with assumed indifference
glide over the very spot where the watch lay at rest under the
apple-tree; and if David were close at hand to exchange a meaning
grimace with him....

My aunt tried setting Trankvillitatin upon me; but I appealed to
David. He told the stalwart divinity student bluntly that he would rip
up his belly with a knife if he did not leave me alone....
Trankvillitatin was frightened; though, according to my aunt, he was a
grenadier and a cavalier he was not remarkable for valour. So passed
five weeks.... But do you imagine that the story of the watch ended
there? No, it did not; only to continue my story I must introduce a
new character; and to introduce that new character I must go back a
little.

XI

My father had for many years been on very friendly, even intimate
terms with a retired government clerk called Latkin, a lame little man
in poor circumstances with queer, timid manners, one of those
creatures of whom it is commonly said that they are crushed by God
Himself. Like my father and Nastasey, he was engaged in the humbler
class of legal work and acted as legal adviser and agent. But
possessing neither a presentable appearance nor the gift of words and
having little confidence in himself, he did not venture to act
independently but attached himself to my father. His handwriting was
"regular beadwork," he knew the law thoroughly and had mastered all
the intricacies of the jargon of petitions and legal documents. He had
managed various cases with my father and had shared with him gains and
losses and it seemed as though nothing could shake their friendship,
and yet it broke down in one day and forever. My father quarrelled
with his colleague for good. If Latkin had snatched a profitable job
from my father, after the fashion of Nastasey, who replaced him later
on, my father would have been no more indignant with him than with
Nastasey, probably less. But Latkin, under the influence of an
unexplained, incomprehensible feeling, envy, greed--or perhaps even a
momentary fit of honesty--"gave away" my father, betrayed him to their
common client, a wealthy young merchant, opening this careless young
man's eyes to a certain--well, piece of sharp practice, destined to
bring my father considerable profit. It was not the money loss,
however great--no--but the betrayal that wounded and infuriated my
father; he could not forgive treachery.

"So he sets himself up for a saint!" he repeated, trembling all over
with anger, his teeth chattering as though he were in a fever. I
happened to be in the room and was a witness of this ugly scene.
"Good. Amen, from today. It's all over between us. There's the ikon
and there's the door! Neither you in my house nor I in yours. You are
too honest for us. How can we keep company with you? But may you have
no house nor home!"

It was in vain that Latkin entreated my father and bowed down before
him; it was in vain that he tried to explain to him what filled his
own soul with painful perplexity. "You know it was with no sort of
profit to myself, Porfiry Petrovitch," he faltered: "why, I cut my own
throat!" My father remained implacable. Latkin never set foot in our
house again. Fate itself seemed determined to carry out my father's
last cruel words. Soon after the rupture (which took place two years
before the beginning of my story), Latkin's wife, who had, it is true,
been ill for a long time, died; his second daughter, a child three
years old, became deaf and dumb in one day from terror; a swarm of
bees had settled on her head; Latkin himself had an apoplectic stroke
and sank into extreme and hopeless poverty. How he struggled on, what
he lived upon--it is hard to imagine. He lived in a dilapidated hovel
at no great distance from our house. His elder daughter Raissa lived
with him and kept house, so far as that was possible. This Raissa is
the character whom I must now introduce into our story.

XII

When her father was on friendly terms with mine, we used to see her
continually. She would sit with us for hours at a time, either sewing,
or spinning with her delicate, rapid, clever fingers. She was a
well-made, rather thin girl, with intelligent brown eyes and a long,
white, oval face. She talked little but sensibly in a soft, musical
voice, barely opening her mouth and not showing her teeth. When she
laughed--which happened rarely and never lasted long--they were all
suddenly displayed, big and white as almonds. I remember her gait, too,
light, elastic, with a little skip at each step. It always seemed to me
that she was going down a flight of steps, even when she was walking on
level ground. She held herself erect with her arms folded tightly over
her bosom. And whatever she was doing, whatever she undertook, if she
were only threading a needle or ironing a petticoat--the effect was
always beautiful and somehow--you may not believe it--touching. Her
Christian name was Raissa, but we used to call her Black-lip: she had
on her upper lip a birthmark; a little dark-bluish spot, as though she
had been eating blackberries; but that did not spoil her: on the
contrary. She was just a year older than David. I cherished for her a
feeling akin to respect, but we were not great friends. But between
her and David a friendship had sprung up, a strange, unchildlike but
good friendship. They somehow suited each other.

Sometimes they did not exchange a word for hours together, but both
felt that they were happy and happy because they were together. I had
never met a girl like her, really. There was something attentive and
resolute about her, something honest and mournful and charming. I
never heard her say anything very intelligent, but I never heard her
say anything commonplace, and I have never seen more intelligent eyes.
After the rupture between her family and mine I saw her less
frequently: my father sternly forbade my visiting the Latkins, and she
did not appear in our house again. But I met her in the street, in
church and Black-lip always aroused in me the same feeling--respect
and even some wonder, rather than pity. She bore her misfortunes very
well indeed. "The girl is flint," even coarse-witted, Trankvillitatin
said about her once, but really she ought to have been pitied: her
face acquired a careworn, exhausted expression, her eyes were hollow
and sunken, a burden beyond her strength lay on her young shoulders.
David saw her much oftener than I did; he used to go to their house.
My father gave him up in despair: he knew that David would not obey
him, anyway. And from time to time Raissa would appear at the hurdle
fence of our garden which looked into a lane and there have an
interview with David; she did not come for the sake of conversation,
but told him of some new difficulty or trouble and asked his advice.
The paralysis that had attacked Latkin was of a rather peculiar kind.
His arms and legs had grown feeble, but he had not lost the use of
them, and his brain indeed worked perfectly; but his speech was
muddled and instead of one word he would pronounce another: one had to
guess what it was he wanted to say.... "Tchoo--tchoo--tchoo," he
would stammer with an effort--he began every sentence with
"Tchoo--tchoo--tchoo, some scissors, some scissors," ... and the word
scissors meant bread.... My father, he hated with all the strength left
him--he attributed all his misfortunes to my father's curse and called
him alternately the butcher and the diamond-merchant. "Tchoo, tchoo,
don't you dare to go to the butcher's, Vassilyevna." This was what he
called his daughter though his own name was Martinyan. Every day he
became more exacting; his needs increased.... And how were those needs
to be satisfied? Where could the money be found? Sorrow soon makes one
old: but it was horrible to hear some words on the lips of a girl of
seventeen.

XIII

I remember I happened to be present at a
conversation with David over the fence, on the
very day of her mother's death.

"Mother died this morning at daybreak," she
said, first looking round with her dark expressive eyes and then
fixing them on the ground.

"Cook undertook to get a coffin cheap but she's not to be trusted; she
may spend the money on drink, even. You might come and look after her,
Davidushka, she's afraid of you."

"I will come," answered David. "I will see to it. And how's your
father?"

"He cries; he says: 'you must spoil me, too.' Spoil must mean bury.
Now he has gone to sleep." Raissa suddenly gave a deep sigh. "Oh,
Davidushka, Davidushka!" She passed her half-clenched fist over her
forehead and her eyebrows, and the action was so bitter ... and as
sincere and beautiful as all her actions.

"You must take care of yourself, though," David observed; "you haven't
slept at all, I expect.... And what's the use of crying? It doesn't
help trouble."

"I have no time for crying," answered Raissa.

"That's a luxury for the rich, crying," observed David.

Raissa was going, but she turned back.

"The yellow shawl's being sold, you know; part of mother's dowry. They
are giving us twelve roubles; I think that is not much."

"It certainly is not much."

"We shouldn't sell it," Raissa said after a brief pause, "but you see
we must have money for the funeral."

"Of course you must. Only you mustn't spend money at random. Those
priests are awful! But I say, wait a minute. I'll come. Are you going?
I'll be with you soon. Goodbye, darling."

"Good-bye, Davidushka, darling."

"Mind now, don't cry!"

"As though I should cry! It's either cooking the dinner or crying. One
or the other."

"What! does she cook the dinner?" I said to David, as soon as Raissa
was out of hearing, "does she do the cooking herself?"

"Why, you heard that the cook has gone to buy a coffin."

"She cooks the dinner," I thought, "and her hands are always so clean
and her clothes so neat.... I should like to see her there at work in
the kitchen.... She is an extraordinary girl!"

I remember another conversation at the fence. That time Raissa brought
with her her little deaf and dumb sister. She was a pretty child with
immense, astonished-looking eyes and a perfect mass of dull, black
hair on her little, head (Raissa's hair, too, was black and hers, too,
was without lustre). Latkin had by then been struck down by paralysis.

"I really don't know what to do," Raissa began. "The doctor has
written a prescription. We must go to the chemist's; and our peasant
(Latkin had still one serf) has brought us wood from the village and a
goose. And the porter has taken it away, 'you are in debt to me,' he
said."

"Taken the goose?" asked David.

"No, not the goose. He says it is an old one; it is no good for
anything; he says that is why our peasant brought it us, but he is
taking the wood."

"But he has no right to," exclaimed David.

"He has no right to, but he has taken it. I went up to the garret,
there we have got a very, very old trunk. I began rummaging in it and
what do you think I found? Look!"

She took from under her kerchief a rather large field glass in a
copper setting, covered with morocco, yellow with age. David, as a
connoisseur of all sorts of instruments, seized upon it at once.

"It's English," he pronounced, putting it first to one eye and then to
the other. "A marine glass."

"And the glasses are perfect," Raissa went on. "I showed it to father;
he said, 'Take it and pawn it to the diamond-merchant'! What do you
think, would they give us anything for it? What do we want a telescope
for? To look at ourselves in the looking-glass and see what beauties
we are? But we haven't a looking-glass, unluckily."

And Raissa suddenly laughed aloud. Her sister, of course, could not
hear her. But most likely she felt the shaking of her body: she clung
to Raissa's hand and her little face worked with a look of terror as
she raised her big eyes to her sister and burst into tears.

"That's how she always is," said Raissa, "she
doesn't like one to laugh.

"Come, I won't, Lyubotchka, I won't," she added, nimbly squatting on
her heels beside the child and passing her fingers through her hair.
The laughter vanished from Raissa's face and her lips, the corners of
which twisted upwards in a particularly charming way, became
motionless again. The child was pacified. Raissa got up.

"So you will do what you can, about the glass I mean, Davidushka. But
I do regret the wood, and the goose, too, however old it may be."

"They would certainly give you ten roubles," said David, turning the
telescope in all directions. "I will buy it of you, what could be
better? And here, meanwhile, are fifteen kopecks for the chemist's....
Is that enough?"

"I'll borrow that from you," whispered Raissa, taking the fifteen
kopecks from him.

"What next? Perhaps you would like to pay interest? But you see I have
a pledge here, a very fine thing.... First-rate people, the English."

"They say we are going to war with them."

"No," answered David, "we are fighting the French now."

"Well, you know best. Take care of it, then. Good-bye, friends."

 XIV

Here is another conversation that took place beside the same fence.
Raissa seemed more worried than usual.

"Five kopecks for a cabbage, and a tiny little one, too," she said,
propping her chin on her hand. "Isn't it dear? And I haven't had the
money for my sewing yet."

"Who owes it you?" asked David.

"Why, the merchant's wife who lives beyond the rampart."

"The fat woman who goes about in a green blouse?"

"Yes, yes."

"I say, she is fat! She can hardly breathe for fat. She positively
steams in church, and doesn't pay her debts!"

"She will pay, only when? And do you know, Davidushka, I have fresh
troubles. Father has taken it into his head to tell me his dreams--you
know he cannot say what he means: if he wants to say one word, it
comes out another. About food or any everyday thing we have got used
to it and understand; but it is not easy to understand the dreams even
of healthy people, and with him, it's awful! 'I am very happy,' he
says; 'I was walking about all among white birds to-day; and the Lord
God gave me a nosegay and in the nosegay was Andryusha with a little
knife,' he calls our Lyubotchka, Andryusha; 'now we shall both be
quite well,' he says. 'We need only one stroke with the little knife,
like this!' and he points to his throat. I don't understand him, but I
say, 'All right, dear, all right,' but he gets angry and tries to
explain what he means. He even bursts into tears."

"But you should have said something to him," I put in; "you should
have made up some lie."

"I can't tell lies," answered Raissa, and even flung up her hands.

And indeed she could not tell lies.

"There is no need to tell lies," observed David, "but there is no need
to kill yourself, either. No one will say thank you for it, you know."

Raissa looked at him intently.

"I wanted to ask you something, Davidushka; how ought I to spell
'while'?"

"What sort of 'while'?"

"Why, for instance: I hope you will live a long _while_."

"Spell: w-i-l-e."

"No," I put in, "w-h-i-l-e."

"Well, it does not matter. Spell it with an h, then! What does matter
is, that you should live a long while."

"I should like to write correctly," observed Raissa, and she flushed a
little.

When she flushed she was amazingly pretty at once.

"It may be of use.... How father wrote in his day ... wonderfully! He
taught me. Well, now he can hardly make out the letters."

"You only live, that's all I want," David repeated, dropping his voice
and not taking his eyes off her. Raissa glanced quickly at him and
flushed still more.

"You live and as for spelling, spell as you like.... Oh, the devil,
the witch is coming!" (David called my aunt the witch.) "What ill-luck
has brought her this way? You must go, darling."

Raissa glanced at David once more and ran away.

David talked to me of Raissa and her family very rarely and
unwillingly, especially from the time when he began to expect his
father's return. He thought of nothing but him and how we should live
together afterwards. He had a vivid memory of him and used to describe
him to me with particular pleasure.

"He is big and strong; he can lift three hundred-weight with one
hand.... When he shouted: 'Where's the lad?' he could be heard all
over the house. He's so jolly and kind ... and a brave man! Nobody can
intimidate him. We lived so happily together before we were ruined.
They say he has gone quite grey, and in old days his hair was as red
as mine. He was a strong man."

David would never admit that we might remain in Ryazan.

"You will go away," I observed, "but I shall stay."

"Nonsense, we shall take you with us."

"And how about my father?"

"You will cast off your father. You will be ruined if you don't."

"How so?"

David made me no answer but merely knitted his white brows.

"So when we go away with father," he began again, "he will get a good
situation and I shall marry."

"Well, that won't be just directly," I said.

"No, why not? I shall marry soon."

"You?"

"Yes, I; why not?"

"You haven't fixed on your wife, I suppose."

"Of course, I have."

"Who is she?"

David laughed.

"What a senseless fellow you are, really? Raissa, of course."

"Raissa!" I repeated in amazement; "you are joking!"

"I am not given to joking, and don't like it."

"Why, she is a year older than you are."

"What of it? but let's drop the subject."

"Let me ask one question," I said. "Does she know that you mean to
marry her?"

"Most likely."

"But haven't you declared your feelings?"

"What is there to declare? When the time comes I shall tell her. Come,
that's enough."

David got up and went out of the room. When I was alone, I pondered ...
and pondered ... and came to the conclusion that David would act
like a sensible and practical man; and indeed I felt flattered at the
thought of being the friend of such a practical man!

And Raissa in her everlasting black woollen dress suddenly seemed to
me charming and worthy of the most devoted love.

Ivan Turgenev: "Raspeberry Spring" from "A Sportsman's Sketches" (1852). Full text, translated in English by Constance Garnett

The illustration for "A Sportsman's Sketches"'s Lgov by Pyotr Sokolov. 1890s.

RASPBERRY SPRING

At the beginning of August the heat often becomes insupportable. At
that season, from twelve to three o'clock, the most determined and
ardent sportsman is not able to hunt, and the most devoted dog begins
to 'clean his master's spurs,' that is, to follow at his heels, his
eyes painfully blinking, and his tongue hanging out to an exaggerated
length; and in response to his master's reproaches he humbly wags his
tail and shows his confusion in his face; but he does not run forward.
I happened to be out hunting on exactly such a day. I had long been
fighting against the temptation to lie down somewhere in the shade, at
least for a moment; for a long time my indefatigable dog went on
running about in the bushes, though he clearly did not himself expect
much good from his feverish activity. The stifling heat compelled me at
last to begin to think of husbanding our energies and strength. I
managed to reach the little river Ista, which is already known to my
indulgent readers, descended the steep bank, and walked along the damp,
yellow sand in the direction of the spring, known to the whole
neighbourhood as Raspberry Spring. This spring gushes out of a cleft in
the bank, which widens out by degrees into a small but deep creek, and,
twenty paces beyond it, falls with a merry babbling sound into the
river; the short velvety grass is green about the source: the sun's
rays scarcely ever reach its cold, silvery water. I came as far as the
spring; a cup of birch-wood lay on the grass, left by a passing peasant
for the public benefit. I quenched my thirst, lay down in the shade,
and looked round. In the cave, which had been formed by the flowing of
the stream into the river, and hence marked for ever with the trace of
ripples, two old men were sitting with their backs to me. One, a rather
stout and tall man in a neat dark-green coat and lined cap, was
fishing; the other was thin and little; he wore a patched fustian coat
and no cap; he held a little pot full of worms on his knees, and
sometimes lifted his hand up to his grizzled little head, as though he
wanted to protect it from the sun. I looked at him more attentively,
and recognised in him Styopushka of Shumihino. I must ask the reader's
leave to present this man to him.

A few miles from my place there is a large village called Shumihino,
with a stone church, erected in the name of St. Kosmo and St. Damian.
Facing this church there had once stood a large and stately
manor-house, surrounded by various outhouses, offices, workshops,
stables and coach-houses, baths and temporary kitchens, wings for
visitors and for bailiffs, conservatories, swings for the people, and
other more or less useful edifices. A family of rich landowners lived
in this manor-house, and all went well with them, till suddenly one
morning all this prosperity was burnt to ashes. The owners removed to
another home; the place was deserted. The blackened site of the immense
house was transformed into a kitchen-garden, cumbered up in parts by
piles of bricks, the remains of the old foundations. A little hut had
been hurriedly put together out of the beams that had escaped the fire;
it was roofed with timber bought ten years before for the construction
of a pavilion in the Gothic style; and the gardener, Mitrofan, with his
wife Axinya and their seven children, was installed in it. Mitrofan
received orders to send greens and garden-stuff for the master's table,
a hundred and fifty miles away; Axinya was put in charge of a Tyrolese
cow, which had been bought for a high price in Moscow, but had not
given a drop of milk since its acquisition; a crested smoke-coloured
drake too had been left in her hands, the solitary 'seignorial' bird;
for the children, in consideration of their tender age, no special
duties had been provided, a fact, however, which had not hindered them
from growing up utterly lazy. It happened to me on two occasions to
stay the night at this gardener's, and when I passed by I used to get
cucumbers from him, which, for some unknown reason, were even in summer
peculiar for their size, their poor, watery flavour, and their thick
yellow skin. It was there I first saw Styopushka. Except Mitrofan and
his family, and the old deaf churchwarden Gerasim, kept out of charity
in a little room at the one-eyed soldier's widow's, not one man among
the house-serfs had remained at Shumihino; for Styopushka, whom I
intend to introduce to the reader, could not be classified under the
special order of house-serfs, and hardly under the genus 'man' at all.

Every man has some kind of position in society, and at least some ties
of some sort; every house-serf receives, if not wages, at least some
so-called 'ration.' Styopushka had absolutely no means of subsistence
of any kind; had no relationship to anyone; no one knew of his
existence. This man had not even a past; there was no story told of
him; he had probably never been enrolled on a census-revision. There
were vague rumours that he had once belonged to someone as a valet; but
who he was, where he came from, who was his father, and how he had come
to be one of the Shumihino people; in what way he had come by the
fustian coat he had worn from immemorial times; where he lived and what
he lived on--on all these questions no one had the least idea; and, to
tell the truth, no one took any interest in the subject. Grandfather
Trofimitch, who knew all the pedigrees of all the house-serfs in the
direct line to the fourth generation, had once indeed been known to say
that he remembered that Styopushka was related to a Turkish woman whom
the late master, the brigadier Alexy Romanitch had been pleased to
bring home from a campaign in the baggage waggon. Even on holidays,
days of general money-giving and of feasting on buckwheat dumplings and
vodka, after the old Russian fashion--even on such days Styopushka did
not put in an appearance at the trestle-tables nor at the barrels; he
did not make his bow nor kiss the master's hand, nor toss off to the
master's health and under the master's eye a glass filled by the fat
hands of the bailiff. Some kind soul who passed by him might share an
unfinished bit of dumpling with the poor beggar, perhaps. At Easter
they said 'Christ is risen!' to him; but he did not pull up his greasy
sleeve, and bring out of the depths of his pocket a coloured egg, to
offer it, panting and blinking, to his young masters or to the mistress
herself. He lived in summer in a little shed behind the chicken-house,
and in winter in the ante-room of the bathhouse; in the bitter frosts
he spent the night in the hayloft. The house-serfs had grown used to
seeing him; sometimes they gave him a kick, but no one ever addressed a
remark to him; as for him, he seems never to have opened his lips from
the time of his birth. After the conflagration, this forsaken creature
sought a refuge at the gardener Mitrofan's. The gardener left him
alone; he did not say 'Live with me,' but he did not drive him away.
And Styopushka did not live at the gardener's; his abode was the
garden. He moved and walked about quite noiselessly; he sneezed and
coughed behind his hand, not without apprehension; he was for ever busy
and going stealthily to and fro like an ant; and all to get
food--simply food to eat. And indeed, if he had not toiled from morning
till night for his living, our poor friend would certainly have died of
hunger. It's a sad lot not to know in the morning what you will find to
eat before night! Sometimes Styopushka sits under the hedge and gnaws a
radish or sucks a carrot, or shreds up some dirty cabbage-stalks; or he
drags a bucket of water along, for some object or other, groaning as he
goes; or he lights a fire under a small pot, and throws in some little
black scraps which he takes from out of the bosom of his coat; or he is
hammering in his little wooden den--driving in a nail, putting up a
shelf for bread. And all this he does silently, as though on the sly:
before you can look round, he's in hiding again. Sometimes he suddenly
disappears for a couple of days; but of course no one notices his
absence.... Then, lo and behold! he is there again, somewhere under the
hedge, stealthily kindling a fire of sticks under a kettle. He had a
small face, yellowish eyes, hair coming down to his eyebrows, a sharp
nose, large transparent ears, like a bat's, and a beard that looked as
if it were a fortnight's growth, and never grew more nor less. This,
then, was Styopushka, whom I met on the bank of the Ista in company
with another old man.

I went up to him, wished him good-day, and sat down beside him.
Styopushka's companion too I recognised as an acquaintance; he was a
freed serf of Count Piotr Ilitch's, one Mihal Savelitch, nicknamed
Tuman (_i.e._ fog). He lived with a consumptive Bolhovsky man, who kept
an inn, where I had several times stayed. Young officials and other
persons of leisure travelling on the Orel highroad (merchants, buried
in their striped rugs, have other things to do) may still see at no
great distance from the large village of Troitska, and almost on the
highroad, an immense two-storied wooden house, completely deserted,
with its roof falling in and its windows closely stuffed up. At mid-day
in bright, sunny weather nothing can be imagined more melancholy than
this ruin. Here there once lived Count Piotr Ilitch, a rich grandee of
the olden time, renowned for his hospitality. At one time the whole
province used to meet at his house, to dance and make merry to their
heart's content to the deafening sound of a home-trained orchestra, and
the popping of rockets and Roman candles; and doubtless more than one
aged lady sighs as she drives by the deserted palace of the boyar and
recalls the old days and her vanished youth. The count long continued
to give balls, and to walk about with an affable smile among the crowd
of fawning guests; but his property, unluckily, was not enough to last
his whole life. When he was entirely ruined, he set off to Petersburg
to try for a post for himself, and died in a room at a hotel, without
having gained anything by his efforts. Tuman had been a steward of his,
and had received his freedom already in the count's lifetime. He was a
man of about seventy, with a regular and pleasant face. He was almost
continually smiling, as only men of the time of Catherine ever do
smile--a smile at once stately and indulgent; in speaking, he slowly
opened and closed his lips, winked genially with his eyes, and spoke
slightly through his nose. He blew his nose and took snuff too in a
leisurely fashion, as though he were doing something serious.

'Well, Mihal Savelitch,' I began, 'have you caught any fish?'

'Here, if you will deign to look in the basket: I have caught two perch
and five roaches.... Show them, Styopka.'

Styopushka stretched out the basket to me.

'How are you, Styopka?' I asked him.

'Oh--oh--not--not--not so badly, your honour,' answered Stepan,
stammering as though he had a heavy weight on his tongue.

'And is Mitrofan well?'

'Well--yes, yes--your honour.'

The poor fellow turned away.

'But there are not many bites,' remarked Tuman; 'it's so fearfully hot;
the fish are all tired out under the bushes; they're asleep. Put on a
worm, Styopka.' (Styopushka took out a worm, laid it on his open hand,
struck it two or three times, put it on the hook, spat on it, and gave
it to Tuman.) 'Thanks, Styopka.... And you, your honour,' he continued,
turning to me, 'are pleased to be out hunting?'

'As you see.'

'Ah--and is your dog there English or German?'

The old man liked to show off on occasion, as though he would say, 'I,
too, have lived in the world!'

'I don't know what breed it is, but it's a good dog.'

'Ah! and do you go out with the hounds too?'

'Yes, I have two leashes of hounds.'

Tuman smiled and shook his head.

'That's just it; one man is devoted to dogs, and another doesn't want
them for anything. According to my simple notions, I fancy dogs should
be kept rather for appearance' sake ... and all should be in style too;
horses too should be in style, and huntsmen in style, as they ought to
be, and all. The late count--God's grace be with him!--was never, I
must own, much of a hunter; but he kept dogs, and twice a year he was
pleased to go out with them. The huntsmen assembled in the courtyard,
in red caftans trimmed with galloon, and blew their horns; his
excellency would be pleased to come out, and his excellency's horse
would be led up; his excellency would mount, and the chief huntsman
puts his feet in the stirrups, takes his hat off, and puts the reins in
his hat to offer them to his excellency. His excellency is pleased to
click his whip like this, and the huntsmen give a shout, and off they
go out of the gate away. A huntsman rides behind the count, and holds
in a silken leash two of the master's favourite dogs, and looks after
them well, you may fancy.... And he, too, this huntsman, sits up high,
on a Cossack saddle: such a red-cheeked fellow he was, and rolled his
eyes like this.... And there were guests too, you may be sure, on such
occasions, and entertainment, and ceremonies observed.... Ah, he's got
away, the Asiatic!' He interrupted himself suddenly, drawing in his
line.

'They say the count used to live pretty freely in his day?' I asked.

The old man spat on the worm and lowered the line in again.

'He was a great gentleman, as is well-known. At times the persons of
the first rank, one may say, at Petersburg, used to visit him. With
coloured ribbons on their breasts they used to sit down to table and
eat. Well, he knew how to entertain them. He called me sometimes.
"Tuman," says he, "I want by to-morrow some live sturgeon; see there
are some, do you hear?" "Yes, your excellency." Embroidered coats,
wigs, canes, perfumes, _eau de Cologne_ of the best sort, snuff-boxes,
huge pictures: he would order them all from Paris itself! When he gave
a banquet, God Almighty, Lord of my being! there were fireworks, and
carriages driving up! They even fired off the cannon. The orchestra
alone consisted of forty men. He kept a German as conductor of the
band, but the German gave himself dreadful airs; he wanted to eat at
the same table as the masters; so his excellency gave orders to get rid
of him! "My musicians," says he, "can do their work even without a
conductor." Of course he was master. Then they would fall to dancing,
and dance till morning, especially at the écossaise-matrador. ...
Ah--ah--there's one caught!' (The old man drew a small perch out of the
water.) 'Here you are, Styopka! The master was all a master should be,'
continued the old man, dropping his line in again, 'and he had a kind
heart too. He would give you a blow at times, and before you could look
round, he'd forgotten it already. There was only one thing: he kept
mistresses. Ugh, those mistresses! God forgive them! They were the ruin
of him too; and yet, you know, he took them most generally from a low
station. You would fancy they would not want much? Not a bit--they must
have everything of the most expensive in all Europe! One may say, "Why
shouldn't he live as he likes; it's the master's business" ... but
there was no need to ruin himself. There was one especially; Akulina
was her name. She is dead now; God rest her soul! the daughter of the
watchman at Sitoia; and such a vixen! She would slap the count's face
sometimes. She simply bewitched him. My nephew she sent for a soldier;
he spilt some chocolate on a new dress of hers ... and he wasn't the
only one she served so. Ah, well, those were good times, though!' added
the old man with a deep sigh. His head drooped forward and he was
silent.

'Your master, I see, was severe, then?' I began after a brief silence.

'That was the fashion then, your honour,' he replied, shaking his head.

'That sort of thing is not done now?' I observed, not taking my eyes
off him.

He gave me a look askance.

'Now, surely it's better,' he muttered, and let out his line further.

We were sitting in the shade; but even in the shade it was stifling.
The sultry atmosphere was faint and heavy; one lifted one's burning
face uneasily, seeking a breath of wind; but there was no wind. The sun
beat down from blue and darkening skies; right opposite us, on the
other bank, was a yellow field of oats, overgrown here and there with
wormwood; not one ear of the oats quivered. A little lower down a
peasant's horse stood in the river up to its knees, and slowly shook
its wet tail; from time to time, under an overhanging bush, a large
fish shot up, bringing bubbles to the surface, and gently sank down to
the bottom, leaving a slight ripple behind it. The grasshoppers chirped
in the scorched grass; the quail's cry sounded languid and reluctant;
hawks sailed smoothly over the meadows, often resting in the same spot,
rapidly fluttering their wings and opening their tails into a fan. We
sat motionless, overpowered with the heat. Suddenly there was a sound
behind us in the creek; someone came down to the spring. I looked
round, and saw a peasant of about fifty, covered with dust, in a smock,
and wearing bast slippers; he carried a wickerwork pannier and a cloak
on his shoulders. He went down to the spring, drank thirstily, and got
up.

'Ah, Vlass!' cried Tuman, staring at him; 'good health to you, friend!
Where has God sent you from?'

'Good health to you, Mihal Savelitch!' said the peasant, coming nearer
to us; 'from a long way off.'

'Where have you been?' Tuman asked him.

'I have been to Moscow, to my master.'

'What for?'

'I went to ask him a favour.'

'What about?'

'Oh, to lessen my rent, or to let me work it out in labour, or to put
me on another piece of land, or something.... My son is dead--so I
can't manage it now alone.'

'Your son is dead?'

'He is dead. My son,' added the peasant, after a pause, 'lived in
Moscow as a cabman; he paid, I must confess, rent for me.'

'Then are you now paying rent?'

'Yes, we pay rent.'

'What did your master say?'

'What did the master say! He drove me away! Says he, "How dare you come
straight to me; there is a bailiff for such things. You ought first,"
says he, "to apply to the bailiff ... and where am I to put you on
other land? You first," says he, "bring the debt you owe." He was angry
altogether.'

'What then--did you come back?'

'I came back. I wanted to find out if my son had not left any goods of
his own, but I couldn't get a straight answer. I say to his employer,
"I am Philip's father"; and he says, "What do I know about that? And
your son," says he, "left nothing; he was even in debt to me." So I
came away.'

The peasant related all this with a smile, as though he were speaking
of someone else; but tears were starting into his small, screwed-up
eyes, and his lips were quivering.

'Well, are you going home then now?'

'Where can I go? Of course I'm going home. My wife, I suppose, is
pretty well starved by now.'

'You should--then,' Styopushka said suddenly. He grew confused, was
silent, and began to rummage in the worm-pot.

'And shall you go to the bailiff?' continued Tuman, looking with some
amazement at Styopka.

'What should I go to him for?--I'm in arrears as it is. My son was ill
for a year before his death; he could not pay even his own rent. But it
can't hurt me; they can get nothing from me.... Yes, my friend, you can
be as cunning as you please--I'm cleaned out!' (The peasant began to
laugh.) 'Kintlyan Semenitch'll have to be clever if--'

Vlass laughed again.

'Oh! things are in a sad way, brother Vlass,' Tuman ejaculated
deliberately.

'Sad! No!' (Vlass's voice broke.) 'How hot it is!' he went on, wiping
his face with his sleeve.

'Who is your master?' I asked him.

'Count Valerian Petrovitch.'

'The son of Piotr Ilitch?'

'The son of Piotr Ilitch,' replied Tuman. 'Piotr Hitch gave him Vlass's
village in his lifetime.'

'Is he well?'

'He is well, thank God!' replied Vlass. 'He has grown so red, and his
face looks as though it were padded.'

'You see, your honour,' continued Tuman, turning to me, 'it would be
very well near Moscow, but it's a different matter to pay rent here.'

'And what is the rent for you altogether?'

'Ninety-five roubles,' muttered Vlass.

'There, you see; and it's the least bit of land; all there is is the
master's forest.'

'And that, they say, they have sold,' observed the peasant.

'There, you see. Styopka, give me a worm. Why, Styopka, are you
asleep--eh?'

Styopushka started. The peasant sat down by us. We sank into silence
again. On the other bank someone was singing a song--but such a
mournful one. Our poor Vlass grew deeply dejected.

Half-an-hour later we parted.