Part 13

On the evening before the Assumption, the high-school boy was heavy with sleep while still at supper. Toward the end of every day, when his head would grow heavy and fall down on his chest,--from fatigue, from talking with the farm hands, from his rôle of a grown-up,--his boyishness returned: he wanted to play a bit with Lily, to have a brief reverie, before falling asleep, of some distant and unknown lands, of extraordinary manifestations of passion and self-sacrifice, of the lives of Livingston and Baker, and not of the _moujiks_ written about by Naumov and Nephedov, whom he had given his word of honour to Simashko to read; he wanted to sleep, for at least one night, at home, instead of getting up before the sun, in the cold morning light, when even dogs yawn and stretch so languorously.... But the maid entered, saying that the farm hands had already gone to the threshing floor. Without listening to his mother’s calls, the high-school lad threw his uniform overcoat with its bobbing belt over his shoulders, and put on his cap; grabbing the pillow out of the maid’s hands, he caught up with the farm hands in the lane. He staggered from drowsiness as he walked, dragging the pillow by a corner, and, as soon as he had stumbled up to the heap of straw and had crawled under an old raccoon overcoat lying there, he sailed off into some sweet, black darkness. But the tiny dog-fleas began to burn him as with fire; the farm hands began talking among themselves....

There were five of them: Khomut,[8] a kindly, shaggy old man; Kiriushka, a lame, white-eyed, irresponsible lad, who gave himself up to a childish vice, which fact everybody knew and which made Kiriushka still more irresponsible, making him bear in silence all sorts of jeers about his short leg, twisted at the knee; Pashka, a good-looking _moujik_ of twenty-four and recently married; Theodot, an elderly _moujik_, from another region, somewhere near Liebedyana, nick-named Postnii;[9] and Ivan,--a very stupid fellow, but one who deemed himself an amazingly clever, cunning, and mercilessly-scoffing man. This last held in contempt all work, save work with agricultural machines; he wore a blue blouse and had impressed everybody with the idea that he was a born machinist, although everybody knew that he did not know a blamed thing about the construction of even a simple winnowing machine. He was always narrowing his morosely-ironic little eyes and pursing up his thin lips, never letting a pipe out of his teeth. He generally kept a portentous silence; but whenever he did speak, it was only to annihilate somebody or something with a comment or a nick-name. He scoffed at absolutely everything: at sense and folly, at simplicity and slyness, at despondency and laughter; at God and his own mother, at the gentry and the _moujiks_. The nick-names he bestowed were absurd and incomprehensible, but he uttered them with such an enigmatic air that it seemed to everybody that they had both a meaning and a caustic aptness. He had not spared even himself, and had given himself a nick-name: “Rogojkin,”[10] he had said once in reference to himself, hinting at something so weightily, so maliciously, that everybody rolled from laughter, and afterwards he was never known as anything but Rogojkin. He had christened the high-school student as well, had said something nonsensical about him as well: “Veretenkin.”

[8] “Horse-collar.” _Trans._

[9] “Lenten.” _Trans._

[10] “Made out of matting.” _Trans._

The school-boy,--so he thought,--had come to know these people well during the summer, had become attached to all of them in different ways,--even to Ivan, who unmercifully made fun of him. He was learning one thing or another from them, was adapting their pronunciation,--absolutely, as it proved, unlike the speech of the _moujiks_ in books; adopting their unexpected, absurd, but unshakable conclusions, the uniformity of their ready wisdom, their coarseness and indifference, their capacity for work and their dislike of it. And, had he gone to the city after the vacation, without reverting to his infatuation for the life of the _moujiks_ during the next summer, he would all his life have thought that he had observed the common people of Russia very well,--if, by accident, a lengthy, frank conversation had not sprung up among the farm hands on this night.

It was started by the old man who was lying alongside of the school-boy and who was scratching more than anybody else.

“Pestering the life out of you, young master, hey? They’re nothing but a misery, Khomut!” said he,--the word “Khomut” he used to characterize not only his entire existence, but also all its weariness, all its unpleasantness.

“Can’t stand it,” replied the school-boy. “The women and wenches now, the devil take them, they won’t touch. But who would you think they ought to be biting if not them?”

“Main thing is, whether a body wear drawers or no, it makes no difference to them fleas,” indifferently agreed the old man, giving off, as he tossed about, a strong odour,--of a body long unwashed, and of a worn peasant’s coat that had become permeated with the smoke of a chimneyless hut.

The others kept silence. Usually, they were jocose before falling asleep, questioning Pashka about his conjugal life, while he answered them with such unperturbed and gay shamelessness that even the school-boy, who was constantly entranced by him, never taking his eyes off his intelligent and animated face, was vexed over any one’s being able to speak so of one’s own young wife. Now no one seemed about to begin questioning, and the student wanted to do so himself, in order to excite his imagination, forever empoisoned by the widow, and to hear the self-assured voice of Pashka,--when the latter stretched himself, sat up, and began rolling a crude cigarette. The old man raised up his head, covered with a cap, and shook it.

“Eh, but you’ll burn this place down some day, young fellow!” said he. “Watch out. It don’t take much to bring on trouble.”

“Well, I’ll get out of it by blamin’ the young master,” answered Pashka, a trifle hoarse from a cold; and, having cleared his throat, he started laughing. “He’s smoking all the time himself. Wonderful night to-night, young master,” said he, changing his tone to a serious one and turning around to the school-boy. “What’s the only thing lacking on this night, you might say? Why, the moon.”

They all felt that he wanted to tell something. And, truly, having kept silent for a while, without eliciting any reply, he suddenly added:

“Are you asleep, young master? What hour might it be now?”

The school-boy raised himself up, pulled his silver watch out of his trousers’-pocket, and began inspecting it by the light of the stars.

“Half-past ten,” said he, bending over.

“Well, now, I just knew it was that,” concurred Pashka, gaily and self-assuredly, lighting his cigarette, which was rolled somewhat in the form of a pipe; it was gripped in one corner of his mouth between his teeth, and he lit it with a stinking sulphur match flaming within his cupped hands. “Just exactly at this time last year I killed a man.”

And the school-boy at once straightened up, letting his hands drop,--and he seemed to be turned to stone during all the time that the others talked. At rare intervals he would put in a word, but it was as though it were not he, but some other who was talking in his stead. Then everything within him began to shiver in an icy ague fit inducive of senseless laughter, and his face began to burn, as though it were aflame.

II

Ivan, as always, maintained a portentous silence. Kiriushka was not at all interested in whatever they were talking about; he lay thinking his own thoughts,--mostly about an accordeon, the purchase of which was his most cherished dream. Theodot, too, who lay leaning upon his elbow, was silent for a long while. He was a strong, flat-chested _moujik_, who at the beginning of the summer had not been considered by the farm hands as one of them, because he wore a short sheepskin coat, without a waistline and without folds in its skirts,--which was the kind worn by the Tartars of Kazan. He had seemed a stranger to the school-boy as well. Just as he liked the cheerful composure of Pashka, the smoothness of his mannerisms, his sun-burned face, so he was not disposed to intimacy by the face of Theodot, also calm but devoid of any expression, large, ashen-gray, wrinkled, with sparse moustaches, always wet from the slavering caused by his pipe; his whitish, weather-beaten lips were turned considerably outward. Theodot was listening attentively, but did not put in a single word during Pashka’s narrative,--only now and then he would give a consumptive cough and spit into the straw. And at first the conversation was sustained only by the dumbfounded school-boy and the old man.

“What are you lyin’ about nothin’ at all for?” said the old man indifferently, upon hearing the boastful declaration of Pashka. “What sort of a man could you have killed? Where?”

“Bust my eyes if I’m lyin’!” responded Pashka warmly, turning in the old man’s direction. “Last year, on Assumption. Not only was it wrote up in all the papers,--it was even in the order sent to the regiment.”

“Well, where was it you killed him?”

“Why, in the Caucasus, in the Zukhdens. Honest to God! Of course, I ain’t agoin’ to lie about it; I didn’t do it all single-handed,--Koslov also fired a shot; he’s also one of ours, from the Eletzkaya province. I wasn’t the only one that got the thanks for it; the division commander thanked him too, in front of all the men lined up, and rewarded us with a rouble each, right off; but then, I know without any mistake that it was me that winged him.”

“What him?” asked the high-school student.

“Why, a convict; this Cheorchian, now.”

“Hold on,” the old man interrupted him. “You just tell the whole thing sensibly. Where was you stationed?”

“There he goes again!” said Pashka with assumed vexation. “There’s a queer fellow,--won’t believe nothing. We was stationed at these New Ceniyaks, now....”

“I know the place,” said the old man. “We, too, was stationed there for eighteen days.”

“There, you see now,--that means I ain’t just making it up as I go along, for I can tell you how this happened, just about. We wasn’t stationed for no eighteen days then, brother, but for a whole year and seven months; as for these here convicts, we was in duty bound to escort them up to the very Zukhdens. These here convicts, now, was the most important criminals what could possibly be,--rebels, they was. So then, ten of them in all was caught in the mountains and put in our keeping....”

“Hold on,” interrupted the high-school student, imitating the old man, and feeling his hands turning to ice; “but how was it you told me that you’d never get to shooting any rebels,--that you’d liefer shoot any officer who might order you to fire at them?”

“Well, I wouldn’t let my own father off, when need be,” answered Pashka, throwing a furtive glance at the student, and again turning to the old man. “Maybe I’d never have laid a finger on him, even, if he hadn’t taken it into his head to ruin us all; but no, he went in for foxiness and we might all have been sentenced to hard labour for a whole year. But as it turned out, it was all for the best; we got thanks and turned out to be a bit smarter than him. Just you listen, now,” he said, pretending that he was addressing the old man only. “We was leading them along, all fair and square. We didn’t have any of these carryings on, like beating them, now, for example, or urging them on with the butt-end of a gun.... But one of them,--a sort of a skinny fellow, short of stature,--was walking along and complaining about his stomach all the time, asking us all the while to let him do something.... He just barely managed to tinkle along in his leg-irons. Then, at last, he approaches the superior officer: ‘Let me lie down in the cart.’ Well, he was allowed to do so, like he was real sick. Only by now we come to the Zukhdens. And the night’s as black as pitch, and it’s raining cats and dogs. We made ’em sit down on the front entrance, and watched ’em; each one of the soldiers had a little lantern in his hands, of course, while the superior officer went off into the room, to try the bars at the windows to see if they was all right, now, and hadn’t been filed away by some hidden file.”

“Absolutely,” said the old man. “According to law he’s got to take over everything in good shape.”

“That’s just what I’m talkin’ about,” confirmed Pashka, again hastily hiding a lit sulphur match in his cupped hands. “You know all this business, now, and that makes it interestin’ to be telling you about it. Well, the superior officer had gone off,” he went on, squeezing out the match and letting the smoke out of his nostrils, “he’d gone off, inspecting things, while we stand around, nodding our heads,--we wanted to sleep something dreadful,--when this here Cheorchian suddenly jumps up, and off ’round the corner with him! That means, you understand, that he had all this business figured out, while he was still in the cart; he had cut the strap around his legs that held the shackles, with the first thing that had come to his hand; had loosened them upon him, then picked ’em up in his hand, so,--” Pashka bent over and, spreading his legs, demonstrated how the prisoner had grabbed up the shackles, “and then had taken to his heels! But me and Koslov was no fools; we dropped our lanterns and took after him: Koslov ran around the corner too, whilst I went straight ahead to cut him off. I keep on running, but all the time I’m trying to catch the clink,--where his chains might be clanking, that is. It ain’t even worthwhile to be shootin’ at haphazard, thinks I. At last, I catch the sound,--and bang! I feel it go past him. I fire another shot,--again I hear it go by him. But Koslov is popping away right and left; like as not to get me any minute.... Then I got riled: ‘Ah,’ thinks I, ‘may your eyes bust out!’ I put the gun to my shoulder and I let’er go: glory be to the Lord, I got him,--I hear by the sound that he must have fallen down. I let out two more shots toward the same spot, and ran; and there he was sitting on his bottom on the ground. He’s sitting down, propped up with his hands in the dirt; his teeth are bared, and he’s rattlin’: ‘Quick,’ says he, ‘quick, Russ, stick your bayonet into me right here....’ Meaning his chest, that is. I charged with my bayonet on a run,--straight through his heart.... Why, the bayonet went right out at his back!”

“Good work!” said the old man. “Let’s have just one good puff.... Well, and where was Koslov at now?”

Pashka inhaled some smoke, deeply and quickly, and thrust the fag-end into the old man’s hand.

“Why, Koslov,” he answered, hurriedly and gaily, flattered by the praise, “why, Koslov is running, yelling with all his might: ‘Did you do for him?’ ‘I’ve done for him,’ says I, ‘let’s drag the carcass away....’ We took him by the shackles at once and dragged him back, to the porch.... I cut him down like a weed,” said he, changing his tone to a calmer and more self-satisfied one.

The old man cogitated for a while.

“And you say the officer rewarded you with a rouble each?”

“That’s straight,” answered Pashka. “He gave it to us right out of his own hands, with all the battalion lined up on parade.”

The old man, shaking his cap-covered head, spat into his palm and extinguished the cigarette end in the spittle.

Ivan, leisurely, through his teeth, drawled out:

“Well, it’s plain to be seen there’s lots of fools among the soldiers too.”

“How do you make that out?”

“Why, here’s how,” said Ivan, “you durn fool! What should you have done? You oughtn’t to have dragged him, but should have sent your mate with a report, and stood guard with a gun over the dead body. D’you understand now, or don’t you?”

III

Theodot began speaking even more plainly, after a general silence and a muttering of: “Ye-es ... well done....”

“Well, now,” he began slowly, lying back on his elbow and casting an occasional glance at the dark figure of the student, motionlessly stuck before him against the background of the starry sky; “well, now, I sinned absolutely over nothing. I killed a man over a mere trifle, you might say; all on account of a she-goat I had.”

“What do you mean,--over a she-goat?” the old man, Pashka, and the school-boy interrupted him in unison.

“Honest to God, that’s the truth,” answered Theodot. “But you just listen a while to what sort of bane this she-goat was....”

The old man and Pashka again lighted cigarettes and began to stamp down the straw, in preparation to listening. The student, too, wanted to light up, but his icy hands would not stir, would not come out of his pockets. As for Theodot, he continued seriously and calmly:

“The whole trouble was just on account of her. I didn’t do the murder on purpose, of course.... He was the first to beat me up.... And there was quarrelling, going to court.... He came, drunk, whilst I jumped out, all heated up, and hit him with a whet-stone.... But what’s the sense of talkin’ about it; as it was, I done penance for half a year at a monastery on account of him; but if there hadn’t been this here she-goat, nothing at all would have happened. Main thing was, none of us had ever kept these here goats; they ain’t in the _moujik’s_ line, and we can’t understand the handling of them; and then, to top it all, the goat turned out to be a bad one, and frisky. What carrion she was,--the Lord save me from such another! Just the same as a little _borzoi_ bitch, she was. Maybe I wouldn’t have wanted to get her,--everybody was laughing, talking me out of it as it was; but I was downright forced to it by need. We ain’t got any large, well-managed farms, nor any sort of free land or forests.... We ain’t had a common pasture land, of our own from time out of mind, and as to what small live-stock we might have, it simply has to find forage on the waste-lands. As for large cattle,--we used to put the cows into the big owner’s grounds, and for all that sort of thing us little fellers was supposed to mow, and bind in sheaves, two acres of grain, and plough two acres of fallow-land; and put in three days with the old woman at mowing, and three days at threshing.... Count it up,--and what don’t it come to?”

“The Lord deliver us!” the old man supported him sympathetically.

“Whereas to buy a she-goat,” Theodot went on, “well, that meant scraping off seven, or say eight, roubles to give away for her; on the other hand, if she tried hard, she’d yield four bottles, no less, of milk, and the milk she’d give was thicker and sweeter nor cow milk. The hard part about her was, of course, that you couldn’t keep her together with the sheep; a she-goat fights with them a lot, when she’s carrying a kid, and once she starts in she gets fiercer’n a dog,--just can’t bear to look at them. And what a creature she was for climbing,--it didn’t mean nothin’ to her to get up on top of a hut, or a clump of willows. Wherever there was a willow, she was dead sure to strip it bare, would strip off all its tender bark--there was nothing she liked better’n that!”

“But you wanted to tell us how you killed a man,” the school-boy uttered with difficulty, looking all the while at Pashka, at Pashka’s face, indistinct in the light of the stars; he was incredulous that this very Pashka was a murderer, and he was picturing to himself a small, dead Georgian, whom two soldiers were dragging along by his chains, through the mud, surrounded by a dark rainy night.

“Well, and what else was I talking about?” answered Theodot, somewhat rudely, and began speaking a trifle livelier. “You can’t understand this business, you ain’t tried yet to live on your own; but to live at home with mamma is a thing any one can do. That’s just what I was talking about,--that a sin like that came about through just nothing at all. I slaughtered three sheep all on account of her,” said he, addressing the old man. “I took in nine and a half for the sheep, and paid eight for her. She didn’t cost me cheap, at that.... And for another thing, I started having rows with my old woman almost every day. Well, as I was saying, I got a triflin’ sum, gave away eight for the she-goat; then, too, I bought a thing or two for the household, a matter here and there, got some little whistles for the youngsters, and started off for home. I pegged along and pegged along, and came home toward morning. I look,--and I am shy a half; that meant that I must have shoved it in my pocket and sown it as I went. The old woman started counting the money. ‘Where,’ says she, ‘is the half? Did you swallow it? I told you, you fool, to sell the sheep as carcasses, and to keep the skins for yourself....’ One word led to another, and then a row began,--may the Lord save me from such another! My old woman, to tell the truth, is such a dog as you’d have to look through all the county to find the like of....”

“That goes without saying,” Pashka put it in a business-like manner. “The more you beat ’em, the better they be.”

“That’s understood,” said Theodot. “Well, she came to her senses and gave in. And when she had milked the she-goat, she became downright glad: the goat turned out to be a good milker, and the milk was fine. So we started in rejoicing. We drove it into the flock. I gave the little shepherd boys something for tobacco, treated them to a cup of vodka each.... Otherwise they would train her to butt the sheep in the belly, the sons of bitches.... Only when the flock comes back at evening,--I look, and my goat ain’t there. I ask the shepherd: ‘How is it our she-goat ain’t here?’ ‘Why,’ says he, ‘we drove the herd to the waste-land near the woods; your goat started playing with the cows, and tackled the bull; she’d back away from him, get one good running start, and then let herself fly straight between his eyes! He got so petered out on account of her that he began hiding from her behind the cows, and when we’d go for her to chase her off, she’d scoot into the oats.... She just knocked us off our feet! And then she ran away: the helper ran after her; he ran all through the forest, couldn’t find her nowhere,--just like she’d fallen through the earth....’”

“Well, right you were ’bout that goat being poison!” remarked the old man.