Read Ebook: The Village by Bunin Ivan Alekseevich Hapgood Isabel Florence Translator

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Ebook has 1073 lines and 71275 words, and 22 pages

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

"Where lieth my little child? Where is his tiny bed? He is in the lofty chamber, In the painted cradle gay.

Let no one come there to us, Or knock at the chamber door! He hath fallen asleep, he resteth Beneath the canopy dark, Covered with flowered silk...."

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

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

But even that proved of no avail.

The government monopoly of the liquor trade acted as salt on a raw wound. When the hope of children failed him utterly, the thought occurred ever more frequently to Tikhon Ilitch: "What's the object of all this convict hard labour, anyway? devil take it!" And his hands began to tremble with rage, his brows to contract and arch themselves, his upper lip to quiver--especially when he uttered the phrase which was incessantly in his mouth: "Bear in mind--!" He continued, as before, to affect youthfulness--wore dandyfied soft boots and an embroidered shirt fastened at one side, Russian style, under a double-breasted short coat. But his beard grew ever whiter, more sparse, more tangled.

And that summer, as if with malicious intent, turned out to be hot and dry. The rye was absolutely ruined. It became a pleasure to whine to the buyers. "I'm closing down my business--shutting up shop!" Tikhon Ilitch said with satisfaction, referring to his liquor trade. He enunciated every word clearly. "The Minister has a fancy for going into trade on his own account, to be sure!"

"Okh, just look at you!" groaned Nastasya Petrovna. "You're calling down bad luck. You'll be chased off to a place so far that even the crows don't drag their bones there!"

During the Fast of St. Peter Tikhon Ilitch spent four days in the town at the Fair and got still more out of tune, thanks to his worries, the heat, and sleepless nights. Ordinarily he set out for the Fair with great gusto. At twilight the carts were greased and heaped with hay. Behind one, that in which the manager of his farm rode, were hitched the horses or cows destined for sale; in the other, in which the master himself was to ride, were placed cushions and a peasant overcoat. Making a late start, they journeyed squeaking all night long until daybreak. First of all they indulged in friendly discussion and smoking. The men told each other frightful old tales of merchants murdered on the road and at halting places for the night. Then Tikhon Ilitch disposed himself for sleep; and it was extremely pleasant to hear through his dreams the voices of those whom they met, to feel the vigorous swaying of the cart, as if it were constantly descending a hill, and his cheeks slipping deep into a pillow while his cap fell off and the night chill cooled his head. It was agreeable, too, to wake up before sunrise in the rosy, dewy morning, in the midst of the dull-green grain, and to see, far away in the blue lowlands, the town shining as a cheerful white spot, and the gleam of its churches; to yawn mightily, cross himself at the faint sound of the bells, and take the reins from the hands of the half-slumbering old man, who sat relaxed like a child in the morning chill and was as white as chalk in the light of the dawn.

But on this occasion Tikhon Ilitch sent off the carts with his head man and drove himself in a runabout. The night was warm and bright; there was a rosy tone in the moonlight. He drove fast, but became extremely weary. The lights on the Fair buildings, the jail and the hospital, were visible from the steppe at a distance of ten versts as one approached the town, and it seemed as if one would never reach them--those distant, sleepy lights. And at the posting-house on the Ststchepnoy Square it was so hot, and the fleas bit so viciously, and voices rang out so frequently at the entrance-gate, and the carts rattled so as they drove into the stone-paved courtyard, and the cocks began to screech and the pigeons to start their rumbling coo so early, and the sky to grow white beyond the open windows, that he never closed an eye. He slept little the second night, too, which he tried to pass at the Fair in his cart. The horses neighed, lights blazed in the stalls, people walked and talked all around him; and at dawn, when his eyelids were fairly sticking together with sleep, the bells on the jail and the hospital began to ring. And right over his head the horrible bellow of a cow boomed out. "Might as well be a criminal condemned to hard labour in prison!" was a thought which recurred incessantly during those days and nights. "Struggling--getting all snarled up--and going to destruction over trifles, absurdities!"

The Fair, scattered over the town pasture land for a whole verst, was, as usual, noisy and muddled. Brooms, scythes, wooden tubs with handles, shovels, wheels lay about in heaps. A dull, discordant roar hung over it all--the neighing of horses, the shrilling of children's whistles, the polkas and marches thundered out by the orchestrions of the merry-go-rounds. An idle, chattering throng of peasant men and women surged about in waves from morning till night on the dusty, dung-strewn alleyways among the carts and stalls, the horses and the cows, the amusement sheds and the eating booths, whence were wafted fetid odours of frying grease. As always, there was a huge throng of horse-dealers, who injected a terrible irritability into all discussion and barter. Blind men and paupers, beggars, cripples on crutches and in carts, filed past in endless bands, chanting their snuffling ballads. The troika team of the rural police chief moved slowly through the crowd, its bells jingling, restrained by a coachman in a sleeveless velveteen coat and a hat adorned with peacock feathers.

Tikhon Ilitch had many customers. But nothing beyond empty chaffer resulted. Gipsies came, blue-black of face; Jews from the south-west, grey of countenance, red-haired, covered with dust, in long, wide coats of canvas and boots down at the heel; sun-browned members of the gentry class of small estates, in sleeveless peasant over-jackets and caps; the commissary of rural police and the village policeman; the wealthy merchant Safonoff, an old man wearing a sort of overcoat affected by the lower classes, fat, clean-shaven, and smoking a cigar. The handsome hussar officer, Prince Bakhtin, came also, accompanied by his wife in an English walking suit, and Khvostoff, the decrepit hero of the Sevastopol campaign, tall, bony, with large features and a dark, wrinkled face, wearing a long uniform coat, sagging trousers, broad-toed boots, and a big uniform cap with a yellow band beneath which his dyed locks, of a dead dark-brown shade, were combed forward on his temples.

All these people gave themselves the air of being expert judges, talked fluently about colours, paces, discoursed about the horses they owned. The petty landed gentry lied and boasted. Bakhtin did not condescend to speak to Tikhon Ilitch, although the latter rose respectfully at his approach and said: "'Tis a suitable horse for Your Illustrious Highness, sir." Bakhtin merely fell back a pace as he inspected the horse, smiled gravely into his moustache, which he wore with side-supplements, and exchanged brief suggestions with his wife as he wriggled his leg in his cherry-coloured cavalry breeches.

But Khvostoff, shuffling up to the horse and casting a sidelong fiery glance at it, came to a halt in such a posture that it seemed as if he were on the point of falling down, elevated his crutch, and for the tenth time demanded in a dull, absolutely expressionless voice: "How much do you ask for him?"

And Tikhon Ilitch was obliged to answer them all. Out of sheer boredom he bought a little book entitled "O?, Schmul and Rivke: Collection of fashionable farces, puns, and stories, from the wanderings of our worthy Hebrews"--and, as he sat in his cart, he dipped into it frequently. But no sooner did he begin to read: "Iveryboady knows, zhentelmen, zat vee, ze Zhews, iss ferightfully foand of beezness," than some one hailed him. And Tikhon Ilitch raised his eyes and answered, although with an effort and with clenched jaws.

He grew extremely thin, sunburned, yet pallid, flew into bad tempers, and was conscious of being bored to death and of feeling weak all over. He got his stomach so badly out of order that he had cramps. He was compelled to resort to the hospital; and there he waited two hours for his turn, seated in a resounding corridor, inhaling the repulsive odour of carbolic acid and feeling as if he were not Tikhon Ilitch and a person of consequence, but rather as if he were waiting humbly in the ante-room of his master or of some official. And when the doctor--who resembled a deacon, a red-faced, bright-eyed man in a bob-tailed coat, redolent of soap, with a sniff--applied his cold ear to his chest, he made haste to say that his belly-ache was almost gone, and did not refuse a dose of castor oil simply because he was too timid to do so. When he returned to the Fair ground he gulped down a glass of vodka flavoured with pepper and salt, and began once more to eat sausage, sour black rye bread made of second-rate flour, and to drink tea, raw vodka, and sour cabbage soup--and he was still unable to quench his thirst. His acquaintances advised him to refresh himself with beer, and he went for some. The lame kvas-dealer shouted: "Here's your fine kvas, the sort that makes your nose sting! A kopek a glass--prime lemonade!" And Tikhon Ilitch bade the kvas-peddler halt. "He-ere's your ices!" chanted in a tenor voice a bald, perspiring vendor, a paunch-bellied old man in a red shirt. And Tikhon Ilitch ate, with the little bone spoon, ices which were hardly more than snow, and which made his head ache cruelly.

Dusty, ground to powder by feet, wheels, and hoofs, littered and covered with dung, the pasture was already being deserted--the Fair was dispersing. But Tikhon Ilitch, as if with deliberate intent to spite some one or other, persisted in keeping his unsold horses there in the heat, and sat on and on in his cart. It seemed as if he were overwhelmed not so much by illness as by the spectacle of the great poverty, the vast wretchedness which, from time immemorial, had reigned over this town and its whole county. Lord God, what a country! Black-loam soil over three feet deep! But--what of that? Never did five years pass without a famine. The town was famous throughout all Russia as a grain mart--but not more than a hundred persons in the whole town ate their fill of the grain. And the Fair? Beggars, idiots, blind men, cripples--a whole regiment of them--and such monstrosities as it made one frightened and sick at the stomach to behold!

On a hot, sunny morning Tikhon Ilitch started homeward through the big Old Town. First he drove through the town and the bazaar, past the cathedral, across the shallow little river, which reeked with the sourly fetid odour of the tanyards, and beyond the river, up the hill, through the Black Suburb. In the bazaar he and his brother had once worked in Matorin's shop. Now every one in the bazaar bowed low before him. In the Black Suburb his childhood had been passed. There, halfway up the hill, among the mud huts embedded in the ground, with their black and decaying roofs, in the midst of dung which lay drying in the sun for use as fuel, amid litter, ashes, and rags, it had been his great delight to race, with shrill shouting and whistling, after the poverty-stricken teacher of the county school--a malicious, depraved old man, long since expelled from his post, who wore felt boots summer and winter, under-drawers, and a short overcoat with a beaver collar which was peeling off. He had been known to the town by the peculiar nickname of "the Dog's Pistol."

Not a trace was now left of that mud hut in which Tikhon Ilitch had been born and had grown up. On its site stood a small new house of planking, with a rusty sign over the entrance: "Ecclesiastical Tailor Soboleff." Everything else in the Suburb was precisely as it had always been--pigs and hens in the narrow alleys; tall poles at the gateways, and on each pole a ram's horn; the big pallid faces of the lace-makers peering forth from behind the pots of flowers in the tiny windows; bare-legged little urchins with one suspender over a shoulder, launching a paper snake with a tail of bast fibre; quiet flaxen-haired little girls engaged in their favourite play, burying a doll, beside the mound of earth encircling the house.

On the plain at the crest of the hill, he crossed himself before the cemetery, behind the fence of which, among the trees, was the grave which had once been such a source of terror to him--that of the rich miser Zykoff, which had caved in at the very moment when they were filling it. And, after a moment's reflection, he turned the horse in at the gate of the cemetery.

"'Morning, my good woman!" Tikhon Ilitch called out pleasantly, as he hitched his horse to a post near the gate. "Can you look after my horse?"

The old woman rose to her feet, made a deep reverence, and mumbled: "Yes, batiushka."

Tikhon Ilitch removed his cap, crossed himself once more, rolling his eyes upward as he did so before the holy picture of the Assumption of the Mother of God over the gateway, and added: "Are there many of you nowadays?"

"Twelve old women in all, batiushka."

"Well, and do you squabble often?"

"Yes, often, batiushka."

Tikhon Ilitch walked at a leisurely pace among the trees and the crosses along the alley leading to the ancient wooden church, once painted in ochre. During the Fair he had had his hair cut close and his beard trimmed and shortened, and he was looking much younger. His leanness and sunburn also contributed to the youthfulness of his appearance. The delicate skin shone white on the recently clipped triangles on his temples. The memories of his childhood and youth made him younger; so did his new peaked canvas cap. His face was thoughtful. He glanced from side to side. How brief, how devoid of meaning, was life! And what peace, what repose, was round about, in that sunny stillness within the enclosure of the ancient churchyard! A hot breeze drifted across the crests of the bright trees which pierced the cloudless sky, their foliage made scanty before its season by the torrid heat, their light, transparent shadows cast in waves athwart the stones and monuments. And when it died away the sun once more heated up the flowers and the grass; birds warbled sweetly in the languor; sumptuously-hued butterflies sank motionless upon the hot paths. On one cross Tikhon Ilitch read:

"What terrible quit-rents Doth Death collect from men!"

But there was nothing awful about the spot. He strolled on, even noticing with considerable satisfaction that the cemetery was growing; that many new and excellent mausoleums had made their appearance among those ancient stones in the shapes of coffins on legs, heavy cast-iron plates, and huge rough crosses, already in process of decay, which now filled it. "Died in the year 1819, on November 7, at five o'clock in the morning"--it was painful to read such inscriptions: death was repulsive at dawn of a stormy autumnal day, in that old county town! But alongside it a marble angel gleamed white through the trees, as he stood there with eyes fixed upon the blue sky; and beneath it, on the mirror-smooth black granite, were cut in gold letters the words: "Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord." On the iron monument of some Collegiate Assessor, tinted in rainbow hues by foul weather and the hand of time, one could decipher the verses:

"His Tsar he honourably served, His neighbour cordially loved, And was revered of men."

And these verses struck Tikhon Ilitch as hypocritical. But in this place even a lie was touching. For--where is truth? Yonder in the bushes lies a human jawbone, neglected, looking as if it were made of dirty wax--all that remains of a man. But is it all? Flowers, ribbons, crosses, coffins, and bones in the earth decay--all is death and corruption. But Tikhon Ilitch walked on further and read: "Thus it is in the resurrection of the dead; it is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption."--"Our darling son, thy memory will never die in our hearts to all eternity!"

His brow furrowed even more severely; he removed his cap and made the sign of the cross. He was pale, and still weak from his illness. He recalled his childhood--his youth--Kuzma. He walked to the far corner of the cemetery where all his relatives were buried--father, mother, the sister who had died when a little girl. The inscriptions spoke touchingly and peacefully of rest, repose; of tenderness towards fathers, mothers, husbands and wives; of a love which, apparently, does not exist and never will exist on this earth; of that devotion to one another and submission to God, that fervent faith in a future life, that meeting once more in another and blessed land, in which one believes only here; and of that equality which death alone confers--of those moments when folk bestow the last kiss upon the lips of the dead beggar as on a brother's, compare him with kings and prelates, say over him the loftiest and most solemn words.

And there in a distant corner of the enclosure, among bushes of elder which dozed in the parching heat--there where formerly had been graves, but now were only mounds and hollows, overgrown with grass and white flowers--Tikhon Ilitch saw a fresh little grave, the grave of a child, and on the cross a couplet:

"Softly, leaves: do not rustle, Do not wake my Kostya dear."

And as he recalled his own child, crushed in its sleep by the dumb cook, he began to blink back the welling tears.

No one ever drove on the highway which ran past the cemetery and lost itself among the rolling fields. Now and then some light-footed tramp straggled along it--some young fellow in a faded pink shirt and drawers of parti-coloured patches. But people drove on the country road alongside. Along that country road drove Tikhon Ilitch also. His first encounter was with a dilapidated public carriage which approached at racing speed--provincial cabmen drive wildly!--and in which sat a huntsman, an official of the bank. At his feet lay a spotted setter dog; on his knees rested a gun in its cover; his legs were encased in tall wading-boots, though there had never been any marshes in the county. Next, diving across the dusty hummocks, came a young postman mounted on a bicycle of an ancient model, with an enormous front wheel and a tiny rear one. He frightened the horse, and Tikhon Ilitch gritted his teeth with rage; the rascal ought to be degraded to the ranks of the workingmen! The mid-day sun scorched; a hot breeze was blowing; the cloudless sky became slate-coloured. And, as he meditated upon the brevity and senselessness of life, Tikhon Ilitch turned away with ever-increasing irritation from the dust which whirled along the road, and with ever-increasing anxiety cast sidelong glances at the spindling, prematurely drying stalks of the grain.

Throngs of pilgrims armed with long staffs, tortured by fatigue and the heat, tramped on at a peaceful gait. They made low, meek reverences to Tikhon Ilitch; but their obeisances struck him as shams. "Those fellows meek! I'll bet they fight among themselves like cats and dogs at their halting-places!" he muttered. Drunken peasants returning from the Fair--red-headed, black-haired, flaxen-haired, but all alike hideous and tattered, and with about ten crowded into each cart--raised clouds of dust as they whipped up their wretched little horses. As he overtook their rattling carts Tikhon Ilitch shook his head. "Ugh, you roving beggars, may the devil fly away with you."

One of them, in a print shirt torn to ribbons, lay fast asleep and was bumped about like a corpse, stretched supine with his head thrown back, his beard blood-stained, his nose swollen and clotted with dried blood. Another stumbled as he ran after his cap, which had been blown off by the wind; and Tikhon Ilitch, with malicious delight, lashed him with his whip. Then came a cart filled with sieves, shovels, and peasant women. They sat with their backs to the horses, rattling and bumping about. One had a new child's cap on her head, worn wrong side before; another was singing with her mouth full of bread; a third flourished her arms and, laughing, shouted after Tikhon Ilitch: "Hey there, uncle, you've lost your linch-pin!" And Tikhon Ilitch reined in his horse, let them catch up with him, and lashed this woman, too, with his whip.

Beyond the toll-gate, where the highway turned off to one side, and where the rattling peasant carts fell to the rear, and silence, the wide space and sultriness of the steppe reigned, he felt once more that, in spite of everything, the chief item in the world was Business. He thought with supreme scorn of the landed proprietors, putting on swagger at the Fair--they, with their wretched troika teams! Ekh, and the poverty on every side! The peasants were utterly ruined, with not a scrap left on their impoverished little farms scattered about the country. A master was needed here--a master!

"But you're not the right master, my good fellow!" he announced to himself with a spiteful grin. "You're a poor, crazy, landless stick yourself!"

Midway of his journey lay Rovnoe, a large village in which the inhabitants were freeholders. A scorching breeze coursed through the deserted streets and across the heat-singed bushes. Fowls were ruffling up their feathers and burying themselves in the ashes at the thresholds. A church of crude hue reared itself starkly, harshly on the bare common. Beyond the church a tiny clayey pond gleamed in the sunlight below a dam of manure, a sheet of thick yellow water in which stood a herd of cows, incessantly discharging according to the demands of nature; and there a naked peasant was soaping his head. He, too, had waded into the water up to his waist; on his breast glistened his brass baptismal cross; his neck and face were black with sunburn, his body strikingly white, pallid.

"Unbridle my horse for me," said Tikhon Ilitch, driving into the pond, which reeked of the cattle.

The peasant tossed his fragment of blue-marbled soap on the shore, black with cow-dung, and, his head all grey, with a modest gesture as though to cover himself, he made haste to comply with the command. The mare bent greedily to the water, but it was so warm and repulsive that she raised her muzzle and turned away. Whistling to her, Tikhon Ilitch waved his cap:

"Well, nice water you have! Do you drink it?"

"Well, then, and is yours sugar-water, I wonder?" retorted the peasant, amiably and gaily. "We've been drinking it these thousand years! But what's water?--'tis bread we're lacking."

And Tikhon Ilitch was forced to hold his tongue; for in Durnovka the water was no better, and there was no bread there either. What was more, there would be none.

Beyond Rovnoe the road ran again through fields of rye--but what fields! The grain was spindling, weak, almost wholly lacking in ears, and smothered in corn-flowers. And near Vyselki, not far from Durnovka, clouds of rooks perched on the gnarled, hollow willow-trees with their silvery beaks wide open. Nothing was left of Vyselki that day save its name--the rest was only black skeletons of cottages in the midst of rubbish! The rubbish was smoking, with a milky-bluish emanation; there was a rank odour of burning. And the thought of a conflagration from lightning transfixed Tikhon Ilitch. "Calamity!" he said to himself, turning pale. Nothing he owned was insured: everything might be reduced to ashes in an hour.

From that Fast of St. Peter, that memorable trip to the Fair, Tikhon Ilitch began to drink frequently--not to the point of downright drunkenness, but to the stage at which his face became passably red. This did not, however, interfere in the slightest degree with his business, and, according to his own account, it did not interfere with his health. "Vodka polishes the blood," he was wont to remark; and, truth to tell, to all appearances he became more robust than ever. Not infrequently now he called his life that of a galley-slave--the hangman's noose--a gilded cage. But he strode along his pathway with ever-increasing confidence, paying no attention to the condition of the weather or the road. Commonplace, uneventful days ruled supreme in his house, and several years passed in such monotonous fashion that everything merged together into one long working-day. But certain new, vast events which no one had looked for came to pass--the war with Japan and the revolution.

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