Part 25

His thoughts circled in his brain slowly and heavily, and the picture wavered before his eyes. Then he crumpled it up and threw it under the counter, but it rolled out again under his feet. Still more exasperated, he crushed it into a tighter ball, and flung it out into the street. The street was full of noise. On the other side some one was walking with a stick. The stick did not strike the pavement regularly, so that it sounded as though the man had three feet. The doves cooed; the clank of metal sounded somewhere, probably a chimney-sweep going over a roof. A droshky went by; the driver was drowsy and his head nodded to and fro. Everything seemed to sway round Ilya. Half asleep he took his reckoning frame and counted off twenty kopecks. From them he took seventeen--three were left. He flipped the little balls with his finger-nail, and they slid along the wire with a slight noise, separated out and stopped. Ilya sighed, laid the frame aside, threw himself on the counter, and lay so, listening to the beating of his heart. Next day Gavrik's sister came back. She looked just the same, in the same old dress, with the same expression.

"There!" thought Lunev angrily, looking at her from his room. He bowed ungraciously as she greeted him, but she laughed suddenly and said in a friendly way:

"Why are you so pale? Aren't you well?"

"Quite well!" answered Ilya shortly, and tried to conceal from her the feeling that her friendly observation of him had roused. It was a warm, happy feeling. Her smile and her words touched his heart, but he resolved to show her he felt hurt, hoping she would give him another smile or friendly word. He resolved, and waited therefore sulkily without looking at her.

"I'm afraid--you feel hurt!" her usual firm voice said. The tone was so different from that of her earlier words that Ilya looked at her in surprise. But she was as proud as ever, and in her dark eyes lay something disdainful, angry.

"I'm used to being hurt," said Lunev now, and smiled at her in challenge, but with the coldness of disillusion in his heart.

"Ah, you're playing with me!" was his thought. "First you'll stroke me, and then strike? Well, you shan't!"

"I didn't mean to hurt you!" Her words sounded to Ilya hard, even condescending.

"It would be hard for you to hurt me, really," he began loudly and boldly. "I think I know now the kind of lady you are. You're a bird that doesn't fly very high."

At these words she drew herself up, astonished, with eyes wide open. But Ilya noticed nothing now, the hot desire to pay her back for what she had done to him burned in him like a flame, and he used hard, harsh words, slowly and carefully.

"Your superiority--this pride--they don't cost much. Any one who has the chance of education can get them. If it wasn't for your education, you'd be a tailoress or a housemaid. As poor as you are, you couldn't be anything else!"

"What's that you say?" she exclaimed.

Ilya looked at her and was glad to see how her nostrils quivered and her cheeks reddened.

"I say what I think; and I do think it. All your cheap airs of superiority aren't worth a button."

"I've no airs of superiority!" the girl cried in a ringing voice. Her brother hurried to her, took her hand and said loudly, looking angrily at his master, "Come away, Sonyka."

Lunev glanced at the pair and answered, with aversion, but coldly:

"Please do go! I am nothing to you, nor you to me."

Both gave one strange lightning glance at him, and then disappeared. He laughed as they went. Then he stood alone in the shop for several minutes, motionless, intoxicated with the bitter sweetness of complete revenge. The angry face of the girl, half astonished, half frightened, was stamped on his memory, and he was pleased with himself.

"But that rascal--he----" a sudden thought buzzed in his brain. Gavrik's behaviour annoyed him and disturbed his self-satisfied mood.

"Another of the conceited lot!" he thought. "Now, if only Tanitshka were to come, I'd talk to her too--now's the time."

He experienced the desire to thrust all mankind away from him, harshly and contemptuously, and felt the strength in him now to do it.

But Tanitshka did not come; he was alone all day, and the time hung very heavily on his hands. When he lay down to sleep he felt isolated, and his sense of injury at his isolation was greater even than at the girl's words. He remembered Olympiada, and thought now that she had been kinder to him than any one. Closing his eyes, he listened in the stillness of the night; but at every sound he started, raised his head from the pillow, and stared into the darkness with eyes wide open. All night he could not get to sleep, because of his terrified expectation of something unknown--a feeling as though he were imprisoned in a cellar, gasping in a damp, close air, full of helpless, disconnected thoughts. He got up with an aching head, tried to get the samovar going, but gave it up. He washed, drank some water, and opened the shop.

About midday Pavel appeared, his forehead wrinkled in anger. Without any greeting, he asked:

"What on earth's the matter with you?"

Ilya understood the drift of the question, and shook his head hopelessly. He was silent awhile, thinking: "He's against me, too."

"Why have you insulted Sophie Nikonovna?" said Pavel sternly, standing very straight.

Ilya read his condemnation in Gratschev's angry face and reproachful eyes, but he bore that with indifference. He said slowly, in a tired voice:

"You might say 'good day' when you come in, don't you think? and take off your cap. There's an eikon here."

Pavel simply clutched his cap and drew it on more firmly, while his lips twitched with anger. Then he began, speaking fast and bitterly, with a trembling voice:

"Go on! Got lots of money, haven't you? and plenty to eat? You'd better think how you once said: 'There's no one to care about us,' and then you find one, and you turn her out. Ah, you--you pedlar, you!"

A dull feeling of slackness prevented Lunev from replying. With an unmoved, indifferent look he regarded Pavel's angry contemptuous features, feeling that the reproaches could not bite into his soul. On Pavel's chin and upper lip lay a thin yellow down, and Lunev found himself looking at this as he thought, indifferently:

"Now he's beginning. She must have complained of me to him. Did I really insult her? I might have said far worse things."

"She, who understands everything and can explain everything; and it's to her--you----Ah!" said Pavel, his talk full of interjections as usual: "All of them--there, are good--clever--they know everything you can think of by heart. Yes!--you ought to have held to her--and you----"

"That'll do anyhow, Pashka," said Lunev slowly. "What are you trying to teach me? I do what I like.'

"Yes, but what do you do? It's a shame!"

"Whatever I like I'll do. I've had enough of all of you! Only get away and chatter what you like." Lunev leaned heavily against the boxes of goods, and went on thoughtfully, as though questioning himself:

"And what could you tell me that I don't know?"

"She can do anything," cried Pavel, with deep conviction, holding up his hand as though prepared to take an oath. "They know everything."

"Then go to them!" cried Ilya, with complete unconcern. Pavel's words and his excitement were distasteful to him, but he felt no wish to contradict his friend. A dull, blank weariness hindered him from speaking or thinking or even moving. He wanted to be alone, to hear nothing and see nothing and nobody.

"And I'll leave you, once and for all," said Pavel threateningly. "I'll go because I understand one thing--I can only live near them, near them I can find all I need--I--they know right and truth! Life to me was never before what it is now, worthy of a man! Who ever respected me before?"

"Don't shout so!" said Lunev half aloud.

"You wooden idol you!" screamed Pavel.

At this moment a little girl came into the shop for a dozen shirt-buttons. Ilya served her politely, took her twenty kopeck piece, twirled it a moment in his fingers, and then gave it back, saying:

"I've no change. You can bring it by-and-bye." He had change in his till, but the key was in his room, and he had no inclination to fetch it. When the child had gone Pavel made no show of renewing the quarrel. He stood by the counter, striking his knee with his cap, and looked at his friend as though he expected something from him; but Lunev, who had turned half away, only whistled softly through his teeth. The groaning sound of heavy waggons in the street and the noise of hasty footsteps of passers-by came into the shop, the dust drifted in.

"Well--what?" asked Pavel.

"Nothing!"

"Oh, very well, then--nothing!"

"For God's sake, let me alone!" said Ilya impatiently.

Gratschev threw on his cap and walked quickly out without another word. Ilya followed him slowly with his eyes, but did not move his head.

"Am I ill, I wonder?" he thought.

A big, fox-coloured dog looked in at the door, wagged his tail, and made off again. Then an old beggar-woman, quite grey, with a big nose, she begged in a half-whisper:

"Please, give me something, kind gentleman."

Lunev shook his head. The noise of the busy day swept by outside. It was as though a huge stove were kindled, where wood crackled in the flames, and glowing heat poured out. A cart, loaded with long iron bars, goes by; the ends of the elastic bars reached the ground and struck, clanking, on the pavement. A knife-grinder sharpens a knife; an evil, hissing sound cuts the air.

"Cherries from Vladimir!" shouts a fruit-seller in a sing-song voice. Every moment brings forth something new and unexpected; life amazes our ears with the multiplicity of its noises, the unwearied persistence of its movement, the strength of its restless creative might. But in Lunev's soul everything there was calm and dead. Everything there was still together. There was there no thought, no wish, only a dull weariness. He spent the whole day in this state, and was tortured all night by nightmare and wild dreams--and many days and nights thereafter passed in the same way. People came, bought what they needed, and went again; his only thought was:

"I don't need them, and they don't need me. That's only strange at first; I shall get used to it! I will just live alone. I will live!"

Instead of Gavrik, the former cook of the owner of the house saw to his samovar and brought him his midday meal. She was a lean, sinister woman, with a red face and eyes that were colourless and staring. Sometimes when he looked at her Ilya felt fear deep down in his soul. "Shall I, then, never see anything beautiful in my life?" And darkly, despairingly, he said to himself: "See how life goes." There had been a time when he had grown accustomed to the manifold impressions of life, and although they irritated him and angered him, he yet felt--it is better to live among men. But now men had disappeared from the world, and there were only customers left. His sense of a common humanity and the longing for a better life vanished together in his indifference towards all and everything, and again the days slipped slowly by in a suffocating stupor.

One evening, when he had closed the shop, he went out into the courtyard, lay down under the elm-tree, and listened to the noise on the further side of the fence. Some one clicked with the tongue, and said softly:

"O--Oh! Good dog! Good little dog!"

Through a chink between the planks Ilya saw a fat old woman, with a long face, sitting on a bench; a big yellow dog had laid one of his fore-paws on her knee, and raising his muzzle, tried to lick her face. The woman turned her face away, and stroked the dog, smiling.

"People caress dogs, then, if there's no one else," Ilya mused. With deep pain in his heart, he thought of Gavrik and his stern sister; then of Pashka, Masha. "If they wanted me they'd come. They can go to the devil. To-morrow I'll go and see Jakov."

"My good dog!" murmured the woman beyond the fence.

"If even Tanyka would come!" thought Ilya, sadly. But Tatiana Vlassyevna was living in a country house a good way from the town, and never appeared in the shop.

XXIV.

Ilya did not succeed in visiting Jakov next day, because his uncle Terenti arrived in the town. It was early morning.

Ilya was just awoke, and sat on his bed saying to himself that another day was here that must be lived through somehow.

"It's a life--like travelling through a swamp in autumn, cold and muddy--and you get more and more tired, and hardly get on at all."

There came a knocking at the door of the yard, repeated, single knocks. Ilya got up, thinking the cook had come for the samovar, opened the door, and found himself face to face with the hunchback.

"Ha! ha!" laughed Terenti, shaking his head playfully: "Close on nine, Mr. Shopman, and your shop still shut up!"

Ilya stood, blocking the entrance, and smiled at his uncle. Terenti's face was sunburnt and looked younger; his eyes were cheerful and happy; his bags and bundles lay at his feet, and amid them he himself looked almost like another bundle.

"How goes it, my dear nephew? Will you let me into your house?"

Ilya stood aside, and began to collect the bundles without speaking. Terenti's eyes sought the eikon, he crossed himself, and said, bending reverently: "Thanks be to thee, oh Lord! I am home again. Well, Ilya!"

As Ilya embraced his uncle he felt that the body of the hunchback had grown stronger and stouter.

"If I could have a wash," said Terenti, standing and looking round the room. He stood less bent than of old. Wandering with a knapsack on his back seemed to have drawn down his hump. He held himself straighter, and his head higher.

"And how are you?" he asked his nephew, as he washed his face.

Ilya was glad to see his uncle looking so much younger. He made him sit down at the table, and prepared tea, and answered questions pleasantly, though a little hesitatingly.

"And you?"

"I? Splendid!" Terenti closed his eyes and moved his head with a happy smile. "I have made a good pilgrimage; couldn't have done better. I've drunk of the Water of Life, in one word."

He settled himself at the table, twisted a finger in his beard, put his head on one side, and began to relate his experiences.

"I went to St. Athanasius and the other holy miracle workers, to Mithrophanes at Voronesh, and the holy Tichon on the Don. And I went to the island of Valaam too. I've travelled a great way round. I've prayed to many Saints and Holy ones, and I've now come from the last--St. Peter and the holy Febroma in Murom."

Evidently it delighted him to tell of all the Saints and places; his face was mild, his eyes moist and confident. He spoke in the half singing way that experienced storytellers adopt in their tales and legends of Saints.

Outside it began to rain; at first the rain drops struck the window as it were carefully and without hurry, then by degrees harder and faster till the glass rang under the shower.

"In the depths of the sacred monasteries there's an unbroken stillness; the darkness is over everything; but through it the lamps before the shrines shine like the eyes of children, and there's a perfume of holy oil of unction." The rain increased; a sound as of weeping and sighing came from outside the window; the galvanised iron on the roof rattled and groaned, the water pouring off it splashed, sobbing, and a network of strong steel threads seemed to quiver in the air.

"This oil of unction, the Chrism, comes from the heads of the Saints."

"O--oh!" said Ilya, slowly. "Well, did you find peace for your soul?"

Terenti was silent for a moment, then straightened himself in his chair, bent forward to Ilya and said, lowering his voice:

"See, it's like this, my unwilling sin crushed my heart like a wooden boot. I say unwilling because if I had not obeyed Petrusha--bang! he would have kicked me out! He would have thrown me on the streets, wouldn't he?"

"Yes," Ilya agreed.

"Well, then, as soon as I began my pilgrimage, my heart was lighter at once, and as I went I prayed. 'Oh, Lord, see, I am going to Thy holy Saints. I know I am a sinner.'"

"That's to say, you bargained with Him?" asked Ilya, with a smile.

"His will be done! How He received my prayer I do not know," said the hunchback, looking upwards.

"But your conscience?"

"How do you mean?"

"Is it at peace?"

Terenti considered for a moment, as if he were listening, then said:

"It is silent."

Lunev smiled.

"Prayer, if it comes from a clean heart, always brings relief," said the hunchback, softly but emphatically.

Ilya got up and went to the window. Wide streams of dirty water flowed down the gutters; little pools were formed between the stones of the pavement; they trembled under the descending shower, so that it looked as though all the pavement quivered. The house over the way was quite wet and gloomy, its window-panes were dim and the flowers behind them invisible. The streets were deserted and quiet; only the rain hissed and all the little gutters splashed along. A solitary pigeon was sheltering under the eaves by the gable-window, and a damp, heavy dreariness invaded the town from all sides.

"Autumn is here!" The thought shot through Lunev's brain.

"How else can a man set himself right with God except through prayer?" asked Terenti, as he began to open one of his bags.

"It's very simple," remarked Ilya gloomily, without turning round. "You sin as you please; then you pray hard, and it's all right! All settled, begin again, sin some more!"

"But why? On the contrary, live honestly!"

"Why?"

"How d'you mean?"

"What I say. Why should you?"

"To have a clear conscience."

"What's the good of that?"

"Oh--oh!" said Terenti, slowly and reproachfully, "How can you say that?"

"I do say it, though," said Ilya obstinately and firmly, turning his back.

"That is wicked!"

"Tcha! Wicked!"

"Punishment will follow."

"No!"

At this he turned away from the window and looked Terenti in the face. The hunchback, in his turn looked searchingly at his nephew's strong face, moving his lips, he tried to find a word in reply, and at last he said, emphatically:

"'No' you say; but it does come! There--I fell into sin, and have been punished for it."

"How?" asked Ilya, darkly.

"Is anxiety nothing? I lived in fear and trembling. Any moment it might be found out, and I should----"

"Well. I fell into sin, and I'm not afraid at all," said Ilya, with an insolent laugh.

"Don't jest!" said Terenti warningly.

"It's a fact! I'm not afraid! Life is hard for me, but----"

"Aha!" cried Terenti, and stood up in triumph. "Hard, you say?"

"Yes! Every one keeps away from me as if I were a mangey dog."

"That's your punishment! D'you see?"

"But why?" screamed Ilya, almost in fury; his jaw quivered, and he tore at the wall behind his back with his fingers. Terenti looked at him in terror, and flourished in the air with a piece of string.

"Don't shout--don't shout so!" he said, half aloud.

But Ilya went on unheeding. It was so long since he had spoken to any one, and now he hurled from his soul all that had accumulated there in these last days of loneliness; he spoke passionately and furiously.

"You've been on a pilgrimage for nothing--nothing--nothing! It's all the same. Nothing would have happened to you. It's not only stealing; you can kill if you like. Nothing will come of it. There's no one to punish you! The stupid get punished; but the clever man--he can do anything, everything!"

"Ilya," answered Terenti, approaching him anxiously, "Wait, wait. Don't get so excited! Sit down. We can talk of it quite quietly."

Suddenly from the other side of the door came the noise of something breaking; there was a rolling and a cracking, and finally whatever it was came to a stop close to the door. The two men startled and were silent for a moment. All was still again; only the rain poured down.

"What was that?" asked the hunchback, softly and timidly.

Ilya went silently to the door, opened it, and looked through.

"Some card-board boxes have fallen down," he said, closed the door and returned to his old place by the window. Terenti still stood up arranging his belongings. After a short silence he began again.

"No--no, think a moment! You say such things! Such Godlessness does not anger God, but it destroys you yourself. Try to understand that; they are wise words. I heard them on my pilgrimage. Ah! how many wise sayings I heard!"

He began again to tell of his travels, looking sideways at Ilya from time to time. But his nephew listened, as he listened to the patter of the rain, and wondered all the time how he should live with his uncle.

Things adjusted themselves fairly well.

Terenti knocked a bed together out of some old boxes, placed it in the corner between the stove and the door, where the darkness was thickest at night. He observed the course of Ilya's life and took upon himself the duties Gavrik had formerly fulfilled; he set out the samovar, swept the shop and the room, went to the tavern to fetch the mid-day meal, humming all the time his pious hymns. In the evening he related to his nephew how the wife of Alliluevov had saved Christ from his enemies by throwing her own infant into the glowing fire and taking the child Jesus in her arms. Or he told of the monk who had listened to the bird's song for three hundred years; or of Kirik and Ulit and of many others. Lunev listened and followed the course of his own thoughts. At this time he made a point of taking a walk every evening, and was always overjoyed to leave the town behind him. There in the open fields, at night, it was still and dark and desolate, as in his own soul.

A week after his return Terenti went to the house of Petrusha Filimonov, and came away sad and grieved. But when Ilya asked him what was wrong, he answered: "Nothing--nothing at all. I went. I mean I saw them all, and we had a talk--h'm--yes!"

"What's Jakov doing?" asked Ilya.

"Jakov? Jakov is dying; he spoke of you; so yellow, and coughs."

Terenti was silent and looked at one corner of the room, sad and melancholy, gnawing his lips.

Life went on uniformly and monotonously every day as like the rest as copper pennies of the same year. Dark misery hid in the depths of Ilya's soul like a huge snake, that swallowed the sensations of the days. None of his old acquaintances visited him; Pavel and Masha seemed to have found for themselves another road in life; Matiza was run over by a horse and died in hospital; Perfishka had disappeared as if the earth had swallowed him. Lunev determined from time to time to go and see Jakov, and could not carry out his determination; he felt only too well that he had nothing to say to his dying comrade.

In the morning he read the newspaper, all day he sat in the shop and watched the yellow withered leaves whirl down the street before the autumn wind. Sometimes a leaf would drift into the shop.

"Holy Father Tichon intercede for us in Heaven," murmured Terenti in a voice that seemed to resemble the dry leaves, while he busied himself about the room.

One Sunday, when Ilya opened the newspaper, he saw a poem on the first page: "Then and Now," and the signature at the end was P. Gratschev.

"Once my heart like a strife-weary warrior Torn by black thoughts as by fierce birds of prey, All hope seemed dead and for evermore buried, Torment and pain were my portion each day."