The Beauties: Essential Stories Page 6

  It strikes him as odd that the snow doesn’t melt on the old woman’s face, and odd that her face itself looks somehow drawn out, and has turned a pale grey colour like dirty wax, and is looking stern and serious.

  “You old fool!” mutters the turner. “I’m talking to you straight, as God’s my witness… and you just… You fool! I’ve a good mind not to take you to Pavel Ivanich after all!”

  He drops the reins and starts thinking. He daren’t turn round and look at the old woman – it’s too frightening. Asking her a question and getting no answer is frightening too. Eventually, to settle his doubts without looking round at his wife, he feels for her cold hand and lifts it up. It falls back like a length of rope.

  “Must have died, then! What a business!”

  The turner begins to weep. Not that he’s so sorry, rather he’s vexed. He thinks to himself: how quickly everything happens in this world! No sooner has his grief begun than it’s all done. He’s never managed to live with his old woman, and tell her everything, and be nice to her, and now she’s died. He lived with her for forty years, but then those forty years all went by in a sort of fog. What with his drunkenness, and the fights, and their poverty, he’s never felt his life. And now, as if to spite him, the old woman has died just at the moment when he’s feeling fond of her, and that he can’t live without her, and that he’s treated her terribly badly.

  “And she used to go all round the village!” he remembers. “I used to send her out myself, begging people for bread – what a business! The silly fool, she ought to have lived another ten years; as it is, she probably thinks that’s what I’m really like. Holy Mother of God, where the devil am I driving? No point getting her treated now, she’s got to be buried. Turn about!”

  He turns the sledge round and whips up the horse with all his might. The driving gets worse hour by hour. Now he can’t even see the yoke. Sometimes the sledge rides up onto a young fir tree; a dark shape scrapes against his hands, flashes before his eyes, and then there’s nothing before his eyes again but whirling white snow.

  “If I could have my life over again…” he thinks.

  He thinks back to forty-odd years ago, when Matryona was young and beautiful, a merry lass from a well-to-do family. They had married her to him because they admired his craftsmanship. The two of them would have had all they needed for a good life; the trouble was that he had got drunk straight after the wedding, collapsed onto the stove, and seemed never to have awoken since that time. He remembers the wedding; but what happened after that – he can’t remember for the life of him. Except that he got drunk, and lay around, and got into fights. And forty years had gone up in smoke, just like that.

  Now the white snow clouds are slowly beginning to turn grey. Dusk is falling.

  “Where am I going?” the turner suddenly thinks with a start. “I have to bury her, not take her to hospital… I think I’ve gone mad!”

  He turns back once more, and lashes his horse again. The little mare strains its hardest, and snorts, and sets off at a little trot. Over and over again, he whips her on her back… He can hear something knocking behind him, and although he doesn’t look back, he knows that the dead woman’s head is banging against the sledge. The air grows darker and darker, and the wind blows sharper and colder…

  “If I could have my life again…” thinks the turner. “I’d get a new lathe, take orders… hand the money over to my wife… yes!”

  But now he drops the reins. He hunts for them, wants to take them up again, but can’t manage – his hands don’t work…

  “Never mind…” he thinks. “The horse will get there on its own – it knows the way. If I could sleep a bit now… Before the funeral, or the requiem, it’d be nice to lie down.”

  The turner shuts his eyes and falls into a doze. A little later, he can hear the horse stopping. He opens his eyes and sees something dark ahead, something like a hut or a haystack…

  He ought to get down from the sledge and find out what’s going on, but his whole body feels so lazy that he’d rather freeze to death than move from the spot… And he falls into a peaceful sleep.

  He wakes in a large room with painted walls. Bright sunlight is flooding through the windows. He can see people around him, and the first thing he wants to do is show that he’s a respectable man who knows what’s what.

  “We have to arrange a requiem, brothers, for my old woman!” he says. “The priest has to be told…”

  “That’ll do, that’ll do! You lie back down!” someone interrupts him.

  “Heavens! Pavel Ivanich!” exclaims the turner in amazement, seeing the doctor in front of him. “Yerexlency! My benefactor!”

  He wants to leap up and get down on the floor before this representative of medicine, but he can feel that his arms and legs aren’t obeying him.

  “Your Excellency! Where are my legs? And my arms?”

  “Say goodbye to your arms and legs… Frozen off! Now, now, what are you crying about? You’ve had your life, and thank God for that! I expect you’ve clocked up sixty and more – what more do you want?”

  “That’s terrible!… Your Excellency, it’s terrible! Please, please forgive me! Another five or six years…”

  “What for?”

  “The horse isn’t mine, I have to give it back… And bury my old woman… And how quickly everything happens on this earth! Your Excellency! Pavel Ivanich! A little cigar box, finest Karelian birch! I’ll turn you a little croquet set…”

  The doctor waves his hand and leaves the ward. That turner – amen, he’s done for!

  THE BET

  I

  IT WAS A DARK AUTUMN NIGHT. The old banker paced back and forth in his study, remembering a party he had given one autumn evening fifteen years ago. There had been many clever people there, and interesting conversations. One of the topics had been the death penalty. Most of the guests, who had included quite a number of intellectuals and journalists, disapproved of the death penalty, calling it an outdated and immoral method of punishment, unworthy of a Christian state. Some of them took the view that wherever the death penalty existed, it ought to be replaced by life imprisonment.

  “I don’t agree with you,” said their host the banker. “I haven’t experienced either capital punishment or life imprisonment, but if one can judge a priori, I believe that execution is more ethical and humane than imprisonment. Execution kills a man at once, while life imprisonment kills him slowly. So which executioner is more humane? The one who kills you over a few minutes, or the one who drags the life out of you for years on end?”

  “Both are equally immoral,” commented one of the guests, “because they each have the same aim – to take away your life. The state isn’t God. It has no right to take away something it can’t give back if it wants to.”

  One of the guests was a lawyer, a young man of about twenty-five. When asked his opinion, he said:

  “Capital punishment and life imprisonment are equally immoral, but if I were asked to choose between the two, naturally I’d choose the second. Living somehow or other is better than not living at all.”

  A lively argument followed. The banker, who had been younger and more excitable at the time, suddenly lost his self-possession, thumped his fist on the table, and shouted at the young lawyer:

  “Not true! I bet you two million you won’t even last out five years in solitary!”

  “If you’re serious,” replied the lawyer, “I bet you I’ll last out fifteen years, not five.”

  “Fifteen? Done!” cried the banker. “Gentlemen, I’m staking two million!”

  “Agreed! You stake your millions, and I’ll stake my freedom!” said the lawyer.

  And that crazy, senseless wager was actually concluded! The banker, a spoilt and frivolous man, with uncounted millions at the time, was thrilled with his bet. At dinner he made fun of the lawyer, telling him:

  “Think again, young man, before it’s too late. Two million means nothing to me, but you’re risking three or four of th
e best years of your life. I say three or four, because you won’t stand it longer than that. And then, don’t forget, you poor thing, that voluntary imprisonment is far harder to bear than when it’s compulsory. The thought that you could walk free any minute will poison your entire existence in your cell. I pity you!”

  And now the banker, as he paced back and forth, remembered all this and asked himself:

  “What was the point of that bet? What’s the use of the lawyer wasting fifteen years of his life, while I throw away two million? Will that prove to anyone whether capital punishment is worse or better than life imprisonment? No, and no again. It’s all pointless nonsense. On my part, that was the whim of a well-fed man, and on the lawyer’s part, nothing but greed for money…”

  And he went on to remember what had happened after that party. It was decided that the lawyer would sit out his confinement under the strictest supervision in one of the outbuildings situated in the banker’s garden. They agreed that for fifteen years he would be denied the right to cross the threshold of that building, or see any living person, or hear a human voice, or receive letters and newspapers. He was allowed to have a musical instrument, to read books, write letters, drink wine and smoke tobacco. His only contact with the outside world, under the agreed conditions, was to be in silence, through a little window built for the purpose. He could receive anything he needed – books, music, wine and the rest – on a written request, in any quantity he liked, but only through that window. The agreement covered every last little detail that would ensure that his confinement was strictly solitary, and compelled the lawyer to serve exactly fifteen years, starting at 12 o’clock on 14th November 1870, and ending at 12 o’clock on 14th November 1885. The slightest attempt on his part to break the conditions, even two minutes before the agreed term, would release the banker from the obligation to pay him the two million.

  During the first year of his confinement, the lawyer (as far as could be judged from his brief notes) suffered severe loneliness and boredom. Day and night, the sounds of the piano were constantly heard from his lodge. He gave up wine and tobacco. Wine, he wrote, arouses longings, and longings are the prisoner’s greatest enemy; besides, there was nothing more dreary than drinking good wine without seeing anyone. And tobacco spoiled the air in his room. During his first year, the lawyer was mostly sent light literature – novels with a complicated love plot, detective stories, tales of fantasy, comedies and the like.

  During his second year, the music in his house fell silent, and in his notes the lawyer asked for nothing but classics. In his fifth year, music was heard once more, and the prisoner asked for wine. The people who watched him through his window said that he had spent the whole of that year just eating, drinking and lying on his bed, often yawning, and talking angrily to himself. He read no books. Sometimes at night he would sit down to write; he would spend hours writing, and then when morning came tear up everything he had written. More than once he was heard crying.

  In the second half of his sixth year, the prisoner began intensively studying languages, philosophy and history. He threw himself into these studies so passionately that the banker could scarcely keep up with his demands for books. Over the course of four years, some six hundred volumes were obtained at his request. It was during this phase of his activities that the banker received the following letter from his prisoner:

  “Dear Jailer! I am writing these lines to you in six languages. Show them to the following people, and have them read them. If they fail to find a single mistake in them, I beg you to order a gun to be fired in the garden. That shot will tell me that my efforts have not been wasted. Geniuses of every age and land have spoken in different languages, but they all have one and the same flame burning within them. O, if you only knew what sublime happiness my soul enjoys, now that I can understand them!”

  The prisoner’s wish was granted. The banker ordered two shots to be fired in the garden.

  Later on, after his tenth year, the lawyer sat motionless at his desk reading nothing but the Gospels. It seemed strange to the banker that a man who had mastered six hundred learned volumes over the course of four years should now spend almost a year reading a single book that was neither thick nor hard to understand. The Gospels were followed by religious history and theology.

  During the last two years of his confinement, the prisoner read great quantities, quite indiscriminately. He would take up natural science, and then demand Byron or Shakespeare. Some of the notes he sent asked for chemistry, and a medical textbook, and a novel, and some treatise of philosophy or theology, all at the same time. He read like a man afloat on the sea, surrounded by the wreckage of his ship, trying to save his life by desperately clutching first to one fragment and then another.

  II

  The old banker remembered all this and thought:

  “Tomorrow at twelve, he’ll get his freedom. Under the contract, I shall have to pay him two million. If I pay that, I’m done for – I shall be utterly ruined.”

  Fifteen years ago he could not count his millions; but today he feared to ask himself which was greater, his wealth or his debts. Playing the stock exchange, risky speculations, and the impetuousness which he couldn’t shake off even in his old age, had gradually brought about the decline of his fortunes, and the fearless, self-confident, proud millionaire had turned into a middle-of-the-road banker who trembled at every rise and fall of his investments.

  “That damned bet!” muttered the old man, clutching his head in despair. “Why didn’t that man die? He’s still only forty. He’ll take my last penny, get married, enjoy his life, play the stock exchange, while I look on like an envious beggar, hearing the same words from him day after day: ‘I owe you all my happiness, let me help you!’ No, that’s too much! My only way out of bankruptcy and disgrace is that man’s death!”

  The clock struck three. The banker listened: everyone in the house was asleep, and the only sound to be heard was the rustling of the cold trees outside the windows. Careful not to make a sound, he opened the fireproof safe and got out the key of the door that had not been opened for fifteen years. Then he put on his coat and went out.

  The garden was dark and cold. It was raining. The damp, piercing wind blew howling through the garden, giving the trees no rest. The banker strained his eyes but could not make out either the ground, or the white statues, or the outbuilding, or the trees. When he reached the place where the outbuilding stood, he twice called out to the watchman. There was no reply. Evidently the watchman had taken shelter from the storm and was now asleep somewhere in the kitchen or the greenhouse.

  “If I’m brave enough to do what I mean to,” thought the old man, “then the first to be suspected will be the watchman.”

  He felt in the darkness for the steps and the door, and entered the hallway of the building. Then he groped his way into the little passage and lit a match. Not a soul was there. There was somebody’s bedstead with no bedding on it, and in the corner the dark shape of a cast iron stove. The seals on the door to the prisoner’s room were intact.

  When his match went out, the old man, trembling with agitation, peered through the little window.

  A candle was burning in the prisoner’s room, giving a dim light. He was sitting at his table. All that could be seen was his back, the hair on his head, and his hands. Open books were lying about on the table, the two armchairs and the carpet by the table.

  Five minutes passed without the prisoner once stirring. Fifteen years of confinement had taught him to sit very still. The banker tapped his finger on the window, but the prisoner did not move an inch. Then the banker carefully pulled off the seals from the door and inserted the key into the keyhole. The rusty lock made a grating sound and the door creaked. The banker expected to hear an instant cry of surprise and the sound of footsteps, but some three minutes passed and everything within remained as quiet as ever. He made up his mind to enter the room.

  A man sat motionless at the table, a man unlike ordinary men. He wa
s a skeleton, with the skin stretched over his bones, long feminine locks and an unkempt beard. His face was yellow with an earthy tint, his cheeks sunken, his back long and narrow, and the arm supporting his shaggy head was so thin and gaunt that it was dreadful to look at. He already had a silvery sheen of grey hair on his head, and no one who saw his aged, emaciated face would have believed that he was only forty years old. He was asleep… In front of his bowed head, a sheet of paper covered in tiny writing lay on the table.

  “What a sorry creature!” thought the banker. “He’s sleeping, probably dreaming of his millions! And yet all I need do is take his half-dead body and throw him on the bed, stifle him a bit with a pillow, and the most conscientious of experts would never find any sign of a violent death. But first let’s read what he’s written here.”

  The banker picked up the paper from the table and read as follows:

  “Tomorrow at twelve o’clock I receive my freedom and the right to associate with other people. But before leaving this room and seeing the sun, I have to write you a few words. In all conscience, as God is my witness, I declare to you that I despise both freedom, and life, and health, and all that your books call the good things of the world.

  “For fifteen years, I have been intently studying earthly life. True, I saw neither the earth nor any people, but in your books I have drunk fragrant wine, sung songs, hunted deer and wild boar in the forests, loved women… Beauties, ethereal as clouds, created by the magic of your inspired poets, have visited me at night and whispered marvellous tales to me, leaving me drunk with wonder. In your books I have climbed the peaks of Elborus and Mont Blanc, and from there I have watched the sun rise in the mornings, and flood the sky, the ocean and the mountain tops with crimson and gold in the evenings. There, too, I have seen lightning flash as though above my very head, cleaving the storm clouds; I have seen green forests, fields, rivers, lakes, cities; I have heard the singing of sirens and the strains of shepherds’ pipes, I have felt the wings of splendid devils who flew down to me to converse about God… In your books I have hurled myself into bottomless chasms, worked miracles, killed, burnt cities, preached new religions, conquered whole kingdoms…