Peasants and Other Stories Read online

  And she had not once been in the workpeople’s barracks. There, she was told, it was damp; there were bugs, debauchery, anarchy. It was an astonishing thing: a thousand rubles were spent annually on keeping the barracks in good order, yet, if she were to believe the anonymous letters, the condition of the workpeople was growing worse and worse every year.

  “There was more order in my father’s day,” thought Anna Akimovna as she drove out of the yard, “because he had been a workman himself. I know nothing about it and only do silly things.”

  She felt depressed again, and was no longer glad that she had come, and the thought of the lucky man upon whom fifteen hundred rubles would drop from heaven no longer struck her as original and amusing. To go to some Chalikov or other, when at home a business worth a million was gradually going to pieces and being ruined, and the workpeople in the barracks were living worse than convicts, meant doing something silly and cheating her conscience. Along the highroad and across the fields near it, workpeople from the neighboring cotton and paper factories were walking towards the lights of the town. There was the sound of talk and laughter in the frosty air. Anna Akimovna looked at the women and young people, and she suddenly felt a longing for a plain rough life among a crowd. She recalled vividly that faraway time when she used to be called Anyutka, when she was a little girl and used to lie under the same quilt with her mother, while a washerwoman who lodged with them used to wash clothes in the next room; while through the thin walls there came from the neighboring flats the sounds of laughter, swearing, children’s crying, the accordion, and the whir of carpenters’ lathes and sewing machines; while her father, Akim Ivanovich, who was clever at almost every craft, would be soldering something near the stove, or drawing or planning, taking no notice whatever of the noise and stuffiness. And she longed to wash, to iron, to run to the shop and the tavern as she used to do every day when she lived with her mother. She ought to have been a workgirl and not the factory owner! Her big house with its chandeliers and pictures; her footman Mishenka, with his glossy mustache and swallow-tail coat; the devout and dignified Varvarushka, and smooth-tongued Agafyushka; and the young people of both sexes who came almost every day to ask her for money, and with whom she always for some reason felt guilty; and the clerks, the doctors, and the ladies who were charitable at her expense, who flattered her and secretly despised her for her humble origin—how wearisome and alien it all was to her!

  Here were the railway crossing and the city gate; then came houses alternating with kitchen gardens; and at last the broad street where stood the renowned Gushchin’s Buildings. The street, usually quiet, was now on Christmas Eve full of life and movement. The eating-houses and beer shops were noisy. If someone who did not belong to that quarter but lived in the center of the town had driven through the street now, he would have noticed nothing but dirty, drunken, and abusive people; but Anna Akimovna, who had lived in those parts all her life, was constantly recognizing in the crowd her own father or mother or uncle. Her father was a soft fluid character, a little fantastical, frivolous, and irresponsible. He did not care for money, respectability, or power; he used to say that a workingman had no time to keep the holy days and go to church; and if it had not been for his wife, he would probably never have gone to confession, taken the sacrament, or kept the fasts. While her uncle, Ivan Ivanovich, on the contrary, was like flint; in everything relating to religion, politics, and morality, he was harsh and relentless, and kept a strict watch, not only over himself, but also over all his servants and acquaintances. God forbid that one should go into his room without crossing oneself before the icon! The luxurious mansion in which Anna Akimovna now lived he had always kept locked up, and only opened it on great holidays for important visitors, while he lived himself in the office, in a little room covered with icons. He had leanings toward the Old Believers, and was continually entertaining priests and bishops of the old ritual, though he had been christened, and married, and had buried his wife in accordance with the Orthodox rites. He disliked Akim, his only brother and his heir, for his frivolity, which he called simpleness and folly, and for his indifference to religion. He treated him as an inferior, kept him in the position of a workman, paid him sixteen rubles a month. Akim addressed his brother with formal respect, and on the days of asking forgiveness, he and his wife and daughter bowed down to the ground before him. But three years before his death Ivan Ivanovich had drawn closer to his brother, forgave his shortcomings, and ordered him to get a governess for Anyutka.

  There was a dark, deep, evil-smelling archway under Gushchin’s Buildings; there was a sound of men coughing near the walls. Leaving the sledge in the street, Anna Akimovna went in at the gate and there inquired how to get to No. 46 to see a clerk called Chalikov. She was directed to the furthest door on the right in the third story. And in the courtyard and near the outer door, and even on the stairs, there was still the same loathsome smell as under the archway. In Anna Akimovna’s childhood, when her father was a simple workman, she used to live in a building like that, and afterwards, when their circumstances were different, she had often visited them in the character of a Lady Bountiful. The narrow stone staircase with its steep dirty steps, with landings at every story; the greasy swinging lanterns; the stench; the troughs, pots, and rags on the landings near the doors—all this had been familiar to her long ago. . . . One door was open, and within could be seen Jewish tailors in caps, sewing. Anna Akimovna met people on the stairs, but it never entered her head that people might be rude to her. She was no more afraid of peasants or workpeople, drunk or sober, than of her acquaintances of the educated class.

  There was no entry at No. 46; the door opened straight into the kitchen. As a rule, the dwellings of workmen and mechanics smell of varnish, tar, hides, smoke, according to the occupation of the tenant; the dwellings of persons of noble or official class who have come to poverty may be known by a peculiar rancid, sour smell. This disgusting smell enveloped Anna Akimovna on all sides, and as yet she was only on the threshold. A man in a black coat, no doubt Chalikov himself, was sitting in a corner at the table with his back to the door, and with him were five little girls. The eldest, a broad-faced thin girl with a comb in her hair, looked about fifteen, while the youngest, a chubby child with hair that stood up like a hedgehog, was not more than three. All the six were eating. Near the stove stood a very thin little woman with a yellow face, far gone in pregnancy. She was wearing a skirt and a white blouse, and had an oven fork in her hand.

  “I did not expect you to be so disobedient, Liza,” the man was saying reproachfully. “Fie, fie, for shame! Do you want Papa to whip you—eh?”

  Seeing an unknown lady in the doorway, the thin woman started and put down the fork.

  “Vassily Nikitich!” she cried, after a pause, in a hollow voice, as though she could not believe her eyes.

  The man looked round and jumped up. He was a flat-chested, bony man with narrow shoulders and sunken temples. His eyes were small and hollow, with dark rings round them; he had a wide mouth and a long nose like a bird’s beak—a little bit bent to the right. His beard was parted in the middle; his mustache was shaven, and this made him look more like a hired footman than a government clerk.

  “Does Mr. Chalikov live here?” asked Anna Akimovna.

  “Yes, madam,” Chalikov answered severely, but immediately recognizing Anna Akimovna, he cried: “Anna Akimovna!” And all at once he gasped and clasped his hands as though in terrible alarm. “Benefactress!”

  With a moan he ran to her, grunting inarticulately as though he were paralyzed—there was cabbage on his beard and he smelled of vodka—pressed his forehead to her muff, and seemed as though he were in a swoon.

  “Your hand, your holy hand!” he brought out breathlessly. “It’s a dream, a glorious dream! Children, awaken me!”

  He turned towards the table and said in a sobbing voice, shaking his fists:

  “Providence has heard us! Our savior, our angel, has come! We are saved! Children,
down on your knees! On your knees!”

  Madam Chalikov and the little girls, except the youngest one, began for some reason rapidly clearing the table.

  “You wrote that your wife was very ill,” said Anna Akimovna, and she felt ashamed and annoyed. “I am not going to give them the fifteen hundred,” she thought.

  “Here she is, my wife,” said Chalikov in a thin feminine voice, as though his tears had gone to his head. “Here she is, unhappy creature! With one foot in the grave! But we do not complain, madam. Better death than such a life. Better die, unhappy woman!”

  “Why is he playing these antics?” thought Anna Akimovna with annoyance. “One can see at once he is used to dealing with merchants.”

  “Speak to me like a human being,” she said. “I don’t care for farces.”

  “Yes, madam; five bereaved children round their mother’s coffin with funeral candles—that’s a farce? Eh?” said Chalikov bitterly, and turned away.

  “Hold your tongue,” whispered his wife, and she pulled at his sleeve. “The place has not been tidied up, madam,” she said, addressing Anna Akimovna; “please excuse it . . . You know what it is where there are children. A crowded hearth, but harmony.”

  “I am not going to give them the fifteen hundred,” Anna Akimovna thought again.

  And to escape as soon as possible from these people and from the sour smell, she brought out her purse and made up her mind to leave them twenty-five rubles, not more; but she suddenly felt ashamed that she had come so far and disturbed people for so little.

  “If you give me paper and ink, I will write at once to a doctor who is a friend of mine to come and see you,” she said, flushing red. “He is a very good doctor. And I will leave you some money for medicine.”

  Madam Chalikov was hastening to wipe the table.

  “It’s messy here! What are you doing?” hissed Chalikov, looking at her wrathfully. “Take her to the lodger’s room! I make bold to ask you, madam, to step into the lodger’s room,” he said, addressing Anna Akimovna. “It’s clean there.”

  “Osip Ilyich told us not to go into his room!” said one of the little girls sternly.

  But they had already led Anna Akimovna out of the kitchen, through a narrow passage room between two bedsteads: it was evident from the arrangement of the beds that in one two slept lengthwise, and in the other three slept across the bed. In the lodger’s room, which came next, it really was clean. A neat-looking bed with a red woolen quilt, a pillow in a white pillowcase, even a slipper for the watch, a table covered with a hempen cloth and, on it, an inkstand of milky-looking glass, pens, paper, photographs in frames—everything as it ought to be; and another table for rough work, on which lay tidily arranged a watchmaker’s tools and watches taken to pieces. On the walls hung hammers, pliers, awls, chisels, nippers, and so on, and there were three hanging clocks which were ticking; one was a big clock with thick weights, such as one sees in eating-houses.

  As she sat down to write the letter, Anna Akimovna saw facing her on the table the photographs of her father and of herself. That surprised her.

  “Who lives here with you?” she asked.

  “Our lodger, madam, Pimenov. He works in your factory.”

  “Oh, I thought he must be a watchmaker.”

  “He repairs watches privately, in his leisure hours. He is an amateur.”

  After a brief silence during which nothing could be heard but the ticking of the clocks and the scratching of the pen on the paper, Chalikov heaved a sigh and said ironically, with indignation:

  “It’s a true saying: gentle birth and a grade in the service won’t put a coat on your back. A cockade in your cap and a noble title, but nothing to eat. To my thinking, if anyone of humble class helps the poor he is much more of a gentleman than any Chalikov who has sunk into poverty and vice.”

  To flatter Anna Akimovna, he uttered a few more disparaging phrases about his gentle birth, and it was evident that he was humbling himself because he considered himself superior to her. Meanwhile she had finished her letter and had sealed it up. The letter would be thrown away and the money would not be spent on medicine—that she knew—but she put twenty-five rubles on the table all the same, and after a moment’s thought added two more red notes. She saw the wasted, yellow hand of Madam Chalikov, like the claw of a hen, dart out and clutch the money tight.

  “You have graciously given this for medicine,” said Chalikov in a quivering voice, “but hold out a helping hand to me also . . . and the children!” he added with a sob. “My unhappy children! I am not afraid for myself; it is for my daughters I fear! It’s the hydra of vice that I fear!”

  Trying to open her purse, the catch of which had gone wrong, Anna Akimovna was confused and turned red. She felt ashamed that people should be standing before her, looking at her hands and waiting, and most likely at the bottom of their hearts laughing at her. At that instant someone came into the kitchen and stamped his feet, knocking the snow off.

  “The lodger has come in,” said Madam Chalikov.

  Anna Akimovna grew even more confused. She did not want anyone from the factory to find her in this ridiculous position. As ill luck would have it, the lodger came in at the very moment when, having broken the catch at last, she was giving Chalikov some notes, and Chalikov, grunting as though he were paralyzed, was feeling about with his lips where he could kiss her. In the lodger she recognized the workman who had once clanked the sheet iron before her in the forge and had explained things to her. Evidently he had come in straight from the factory; his face looked dark and grimy, and on one cheek, near his nose, was a smudge of soot. His hands were perfectly black, and his unbelted shirt shone with oil and grease. He was a man of thirty, of medium height, with black hair and broad shoulders and a look of great physical strength. At the first glance Anna Akimovna perceived that he must be a foreman, who must be receiving at least thirty-five rubles a month, and a stern, loud-voiced man who struck the workmen in the face; all this was evident from his manner of standing, from the attitude he involuntarily assumed at once on seeing a lady in his room, and most of all from the fact that he did not wear top boots, that he had breast pockets and a pointed, picturesquely clipped beard. Her father, Akim Ivanovich, had been the brother of the factory owner, and yet he had been afraid of foremen like this lodger and had tried to win their favor.

  “Excuse me for having come in here in your absence,” said Anna Akimovna.

  The workman looked at her in surprise, smiled in confusion, and did not speak.

  “You must speak a little louder, madam . . .” said Chalikov softly. “When Mr. Pimenov comes home from the factory in the evenings he is a little hard of hearing.”

  But Anna Akimovna was by now relieved that there was nothing more for her to do here; she nodded to them and went rapidly out of the room. Pimenov went to see her out.

  “Have you been long in our employment?” she asked in a loud voice, without turning to him.

  “From nine years old. I entered the factory in your uncle’s time.”

  “That’s a long while! My uncle and my father knew all the workpeople, and I know hardly any of them. I had seen you before, but I did not know your name was Pimenov.”

  Anna Akimovna felt a desire to justify herself before him, to pretend that she had just given the money not seriously, but as a joke.

  “Oh, this poverty,” she sighed. “We give charity on holidays and working days, and still there is no sense in it. I believe it is useless to help such people as this Chalikov.”

  “Of course it is useless,” he agreed. “However much you give him, he will drink it all away. And now the husband and wife will be snatching it from one another and fighting all night,” he added with a laugh.

  “Yes, one must admit that our philanthropy is useless, boring, and absurd. But still, you must agree, one can’t sit with one’s hand in one’s lap; one must do something. What’s to be done with the Chalikovs, for instance?”

  She turned to Pimenov and s
topped, expecting an answer from him; he, too, stopped and slowly, without speaking, shrugged his shoulders. Obviously he knew what to do with the Chalikovs, but the treatment would have been so coarse and inhuman that he did not venture to put it into words. And the Chalikovs were to him so utterly uninteresting and worthless that a moment later he had forgotten them; looking into Anna Akimovna’s eyes, he smiled with pleasure, and his face wore an expression as though he were dreaming about something very pleasant. Only, now standing close to him, Anna Akimovna saw from his face, and especially from his eyes, how exhausted and sleepy he was.

  “Here, I ought to give him the fifteen hundred rubles!” she thought, but for some reason this idea seemed to her incongruous and insulting to Pimenov.