The Beauties: Essential Stories Read online

  A light blue speck appears in the sky.

  “Look at that!” says Terenty. “The rain’s burst open an anthill! It’s drowned those rascals!”

  They bend over the anthill. The downpour has washed away the ants’ dwelling, and the insects are running about in dismay, ministering to their drowned fellows.

  “Don’t you fret, it won’t kill you,” says the cobbler with a grin. “As soon as the sun warms you up, you’ll come back to life again… Let that be a lesson to you, you fools. Don’t set up house on low ground next time…”

  They walk on.

  “Here are some bees!” cries Danilka, pointing at a branch of a young oak.

  The bees, soaked and chilled through, are huddled tightly together on the branch. There are so many that neither bark nor leaves can be seen. Many of them have settled on top of one another.

  “That’s a swarm,” explains Terenty. “They were all flying around, looking for a home, and when the rain fell on them, they settled. If a swarm’s in the air, all you have to do is splash some water on them and they’ll settle. And then, supposing you want to take them, you lower the branch they’re on into a sack and give it a shake, and they all fall in.”

  Little Fiokla suddenly grimaces and scratches roughly at her neck. Her brother looks at her neck and sees a big blister there.

  “Heh-heh!” laughs the cobbler. “Fiokla, my friend, do you know where you got that lump from? Somewhere in that thicket there are some Spanish flies on one of the trees. And the water trickled off them and dripped onto your neck – and that’s what gave you your blister.”

  The sun comes out from behind the clouds, and the woods, the fields and our three wanderers bask in its light and warmth. The dark storm cloud has gone far away, taking the thunder with it. The air grows warm and fragrant. It smells of bird cherries, meadowsweet and lilies of the valley.

  “They give you that herb if you have a nosebleed,” says Terenty, pointing to a furry flower. “It helps.”

  There’s a whistle and a rumble, but it’s not the same rumble as the one that the clouds have just carried away. A goods train races past in front of Terenty’s, Danilka’s and Fiokla’s eyes. The engine, puffing and belching out black smoke, is pulling more than twenty trucks behind it. It’s amazingly powerful. The children would like to know how a railway engine, which isn’t alive and has no horses to help it, can move along and drag such a weight with it; and Terenty sets out to explain it to them:

  “It’s all to do with the steam, children… The steam works… So it presses under that thing next to the wheels, and that’s… what I mean… that’s what makes it go…”

  The three of them cross the railway track and walk down the embankment towards the river. They’re not going for any particular reason, just following their noses, talking all the way. Danilka asks questions, and Terenty answers them…

  Terenty answers all the questions; there isn’t a mystery in the whole of nature that can stump him. He knows everything. He knows the names of all the grasses in the fields, and all the animals and stones. He knows which herbs are used to cure diseases, and has no difficulty telling the age of a horse or a cow. By looking at the sunset, or the moon, or the birds, he can tell what the weather will be like tomorrow. And it isn’t just Terenty who’s so knowledgeable. Silanty Silych, and the innkeeper, the market gardener, the shepherd, in fact the whole village – everyone knows just as much as he does. Those people haven’t learnt from books, but from the fields, the woods, and the riverbanks. The birds themselves taught them as they sang their songs, and the sun as it set and left a crimson glow behind it, and the very trees and grasses too.

  Danilka watches Terenty and eagerly takes in every word. In the springtime, when the warmth and the monotonous green of the fields haven’t yet grown stale for us, when everything is new and breathes freshness, who wouldn’t be interested to hear about golden May beetles, or cranes, or wheat coming into ear, or gurgling brooks?

  The two of them, cobbler and orphan, walk through the fields, talking endlessly, never tiring. They could happily wander the wide world for ever. As they walk, deep in conversation about the beauty of the earth, they don’t notice the frail little beggar-girl hurrying along after them. She’s trudging along, driving herself on, and getting breathless. There are tears in her eyes. She’d be happy to abandon these tireless wanderers, but where could she go, and to whom? She has neither home nor family. So, willy-nilly, she has to follow along and listen to the conversation.

  A little before midday, all three sit down on the riverbank. Danilka reaches into his bag to take out a piece of bread, sodden and reduced to porridge, and the wanderers begin to eat. When he’s had his bread, Terenty says a prayer, then stretches out on the sandy bank and falls asleep. While he’s asleep, the boy watches the water and thinks. All sorts of thoughts come into his head. Today he’s seen a thunderstorm, bees, ants, and a train, and now there are little fishes darting busily about before his eyes. Some are a couple of inches long or more, others no bigger than a fingernail. And an adder, with its head held high, is swimming from one bank to the other.

  Not until evening do our wanderers return to the village. The children go to spend the night in an abandoned barn which was once used to store the communal grain; Terenty bids them good night and goes off to the tavern. The children huddle together on the straw and fall into a doze.

  The boy isn’t asleep. He’s gazing into the darkness, and it seems to him that he can see everything that he saw today: the storm clouds, the bright sun, the birds, the little fishes, and lanky Terenty. All this mass of different impressions, and his exhaustion and hunger, take their toll. He’s burning as though on fire, and rolling over from side to side. He wants to tell someone everything he’s now imagining in the darkness, everything that’s making his thoughts race; but there’s no one to tell. Fiokla is still too small, she’d never understand.

  “I’ll be sure and tell Terenty tomorrow…” thinks the boy.

  The children fall asleep, thinking about the homeless cobbler. And in the night-time Terenty comes to them, makes the sign of the cross over them, and lays some bread by their heads. Nobody sees that love. Nobody, save perhaps the moon, as it sails across the sky and peeps tenderly through the holes in the eaves into the derelict barn.

  A BLUNDER

  ILYA SERGEYICH PEPLOV and his wife Kleopatra Petrovna stood behind the door, listening eagerly. Inside, in the little parlour, a declaration of love seemed to be in progress between their daughter, Natashenka, and Schupkin, a teacher at the local school.

  “He’s taking the bait!” whispered Peplov, trembling with impatience and rubbing his hands. “Now you watch it, Petrovna, the moment they start talking about their feelings, you get the icon down from the wall and we’ll go in and bless them… catch them at it… A blessing with an icon is sacred and inviolable… He won’t get away after that, not even if he goes to law.”

  Inside the room, the following conversation was going on:

  “Stop being like that,” said Schupkin, striking a match against his checked breeches. “I never wrote you any letters!”

  “Oh, yes! As if I didn’t know your handwriting!” giggled the young lady, with an affected squeal, as she examined herself in the mirror. “I knew you right away! And what a peculiar man you are! You teach calligraphy, but you write like a farmyard chicken! How can you teach handwriting when your own is so awful?”

  “Hm! That doesn’t mean a thing. The main point about teaching calligraphy isn’t the actual handwriting, it’s making sure the pupils don’t misbehave. Some of them you have to smack on the head with a ruler, others you smack on the knees… Anyway, what’s handwriting? A waste of time! Nekrasov was a writer, but the way he wrote was a disgrace. They show his handwriting in his Collected Works.”

  “Nekrasov’s one thing, you’re another.” (Sigh.) “I’d be happy to marry a writer. He’d always be writing me poems.”

  “I’ll write you a poem if you like
.”

  “What can you write about?”

  “Love… feelings… your eyes… When you read it, you’ll be overwhelmed… You’ll have tears in your eyes! So, if I write you some poetic verses, will you let me kiss your hand?”

  “What a fuss over nothing!… Kiss it here and now, if you like!”

  Schupkin sprang up, wide-eyed, and knelt down to that plump hand that smelt of egg soap.

  “Get the icon down,” said Peplov hurriedly, nudging his wife with his elbow. Pale with excitement, he buttoned up his coat. “Let’s go! Come on!”

  And without a second’s delay, Peplov flung open the door.

  “My children…” he quavered, raising his hands and blinking tearful eyes. “The Lord bless you, my children… Live happy… be fruitful and multiply…”

  “And I bless you too…” said Mama, weeping with joy. “Be happy, my dears! Ah, you’re robbing me of my only treasure!” she went on, turning to Schupkin. “Love my daughter, care for her…”

  Schupkin gaped in astonishment and terror. This onslaught by the two parents had been so sudden and daring, he couldn’t bring out a single word.

  “They’ve got me surrounded!” he thought, feeling faint with horror. “You’re done for, brother! No escape!”

  And he humbly lowered his head for the blessing, as if to say: “Take me, I’m beaten!”

  “I bless… bless you…” began Papa, and he also burst into tears. “Natashenka, my daughter… come and stand beside him… Petrovna, pass me the icon…”

  But then Papa suddenly stopped crying, and his face twisted with fury.

  “Blockhead!” he snapped angrily at his wife. “You stupid ass! What sort of icon is this?”

  “O blessed Saints above!”

  What had happened? Timidly the calligraphy teacher raised his eyes and saw that he was saved. Instead of the icon, Mama in her haste had snatched down from the wall a portrait of the writer Lazhechnikov. Old Peplov and his spouse Kleopatra Petrovna stood there all abashed, holding the portrait in their hands, not knowing what to say or do. The calligraphy teacher made the most of the confusion and took to his heels.

  ABOUT LOVE

  AT LUNCH NEXT DAY they were served delicious little pies, crayfish and mutton cutlets; and while they were eating, Nikanor the cook came up to ask what the guests would like for dinner. He was a man of medium height with a puffy face and small eyes, and so clean-shaven that his whiskers seemed to have been plucked out by the roots rather than shaved off.

  Aliokhin said that the beautiful Pelageya was in love with this cook. As he was a drunkard and a brawler, she had refused to marry him, but was willing just to live with him. But he was very devout, and his religious beliefs didn’t allow him to live with her like that; he insisted that she must marry him, didn’t want her on any other terms, and when he was drunk he would swear at her and even beat her. When he was drunk she would hide upstairs, sobbing, and then Aliokhin and the servants wouldn’t leave the house, in case she needed their protection.

  The conversation turned to love.

  “How love is born,” said Aliokhin, “and why Pelageya didn’t fall in love with someone else, more of a match for her mind and her looks – why she had to fall in love with Nikanor, that snout-face – everyone round here calls him snout-face – when love involves vital questions about a person’s happiness – those are things that no one understands, and you can say what you like about them. There’s only one indisputable truth that’s ever been told about love, and that’s ‘this is a great mystery’. Anything else that’s been written or said about love hasn’t answered any questions, but just restated them, and they still haven’t ever been resolved. Any explanation that seems to do for one case will be useless for a dozen others, and I think the best thing is to explain each case on its own merits, without trying to generalize. As the doctors put it, we have to individualize each separate case.”

  “Quite right,” agreed Burkin.

  “We Russians, educated people I mean, simply love such questions with no answers. Love generally gets poeticized, adorned with roses and nightingales; but we Russians adorn our love with these fateful questions – and what’s more, we choose the least interesting ones. In Moscow, while I was still a student, I had a lover, a charming lady, and whenever I held her in my arms she’d always be wondering how much I’d be giving her a month, and what beef cost per pound just then. And we too, when we’re in love, never stop asking ourselves questions – whether this is honourable or dishonourable, sensible or stupid, where this love is leading, and so forth. Whether all that’s good or not I don’t know, but I do know that it’s unsatisfying and upsetting and gets in our way.”

  It looked as if he was about to tell us a story. People who live alone always have something on their mind that they’d like to talk about. In town, bachelors go to the bathhouse or the restaurant just to chat, and sometimes they tell the bathhouse attendants or the waiters very interesting stories; in the country they generally pour out their souls to their guests. Outside the windows there was a grey sky and rain-sodden trees; in weather like that, there was nowhere to go and nothing to do but tell stories and listen to them.

  “I live at Sofyino and I’ve been farming for years,” began Aliokhin; “ever since I left university. I was brought up to do nothing, and I would have liked to devote myself to study, but the estate, when I came here, was deep in debt; and since my father had run into debt partly through spending a great deal on my education, I decided that I wouldn’t leave, but would work until I’d paid off the debt. Having taken that decision, I started working here, and I must confess that it rather repelled me. The soil here doesn’t yield much, and in order to turn a profit from your farming you have to use either serfs or hired labourers, which amounts to practically the same thing; or else run your estate the way the peasants do – I mean, work in the fields yourself, with your family. There’s no middle way. But at the time I didn’t get into such subtle arguments. I didn’t leave a single clod of earth unturned, I brought in all the peasants, men and women, from the villages around, and the work carried on at a frantic pace. I went out ploughing myself, and sowing, and reaping, and it bored me, and I had the same disgusted expression on my face as a village cat that’s so hungry it’s reduced to eating cucumbers from the kitchen garden. My whole body ached; I slept as I walked. At first I thought I could easily reconcile such a life of labour with my habits as a cultured man; all I had to do, I thought, was maintain a semblance of order in my life. I made my home upstairs here, in the best rooms, and arranged to have coffee and liqueurs brought to me after lunch and dinner, and when I went to bed I read the European Messenger every night. But one day Father Ivan, our priest, dropped in, and drank up all my liqueurs at a single sitting; and the European Messenger went to the priest’s daughters too, since in summertime, particularly during haymaking, I never had time to go to bed, but lay down to sleep on a sledge in the barn, or in a forest hut – how could I have done any reading? Bit by bit I’ve moved downstairs, and started eating in the servants’ kitchen, and all I have left of my former luxury is these servants, who’ve been here since my father’s time and whom I can’t bear to send away.

  “Near the beginning of my time here I was elected an honorary justice of the peace. Occasionally I had to go to town for meetings of the committee and the district court, and that was a change of scene for me. When you spend two or three months living here without a break, particularly in winter, you eventually find yourself longing for a black frock coat. And the district court had frock coats, and uniforms, and tailcoats – nothing but lawyers, people with a broad education. There was somebody to talk to. After sleeping in a sledge and eating in the servants’ kitchen, the chance to sit in an armchair wearing clean linen and light boots, with a chain on one’s chest, was such a luxury!

  “People in town gave me a warm welcome, and I was eager to make new friends. And of all my friendships there, the closest and, I must say, the pleasantest for me w
as my friendship with Luganovich, the deputy chairman of the district court. You both know him: he’s an absolutely charming person. That happened just after the famous case of the arsonists: the investigation had gone on for two days, and we were exhausted. Luganovich looked at me and said:

  “‘Do you know what? Let’s go and dine at my home.’

  “That was unexpected, since I didn’t know Luganovich well, I had only met him officially, and I’d never been to his home. I looked in at my lodgings for a minute to change, and set off to dinner. And that was where it came about that I met Luganovich’s wife, Anna Alexeyevna. She was still very young then, no more than twenty-two, and she’d had her first child six months before. All that’s in the past, and right now I’d have trouble deciding what exactly it was that was so unusual in her – what appealed to me so much. But at the time, at dinner, everything was absolutely clear to me. I was looking at a woman who was young, beautiful, kind, cultured, and fascinating, a woman like no one I had ever met before; and I instantly felt that this was someone close to me, someone already familiar – as if I had once seen that face, with its friendly, intelligent eyes, at some time in my childhood, in the album that lay on my mother’s chest of drawers.

  “Four Jews had been charged in the arson case, accused of being a criminal gang, and as far as I could see there was no case against them. At dinner I became very agitated and upset; I can’t remember what I said, only Anna Alexeyevna kept shaking her head and asking her husband:

  “‘Dmitry, how can that happen?’

  “Luganovich was a good fellow, one of those simple souls who cling firmly to the view that if someone lands up in court, that means he’s guilty, and that one can’t express any doubts about the fairness of the sentence except in legal form, on paper – certainly not in a private conversation over dinner.

  “‘You and I never set the place on fire,’ he said gently, ‘and there you are, we’re not up in court, and we’re not going to prison.’