ORLóFF AND HIS WIFE

Almost every Saturday, just before the All-Night Vigil Service,[1] from two windows in the cellar of merchant Petúnnikoff's old and filthy house, opening on the narrow court-yard encumbered with various utensils, and built up with wooden servants'-quarters ricketty with age, broke forth the vehement shrieks of a woman:

[1] The evening service, composed of Vespers and Matins, which is used on Saturdays, and on the Eves of most other Feast-days. Sunday begins with sunset on Saturday, in the Holy Catholic Orthodox Church of the East, and the appointed evening service is obligatory before the Liturgy can be celebrated on Sunday morning.—Translator.

"Stop! Stop, you drunken devil!" the woman cried in a low contralto voice.

"Let go!" replied a man's tenor voice.

"I won't, I won't. I'll give it to you, you monster!"

"You li-ie! You will let me go!"

"You may kill me—but I won't!"

"You? You li-ie, you heretic!"

"Heavens! He has murdered me ... he-eavens!"

"Will you let go?!"

"Beat away, you wild beast, beat me to death!"

"You can wait.... I won't do it all at once!"

At the first words of this dialogue, Sénka Tchízhik, the apprentice of house-painter Sutchkóff, who ground paint whole days together in one of the small sheds in the court-yard,[Pg 4] flew headlong thence, his little eyes, black as those of a mouse, sparkling, yelling at the top of his voice:

"Shoemaker Orlóff and his wife are fighting! My eye! what a lively time they're having!"

Tchízhik, who was passionately fond of all possible sorts of events, rushed to the windows of the Orlóffs' lodgings, flung himself on the ground on his stomach, and hanging down his shaggy, saucy head, with its bold, thin face streaked with ochre and reddish-brown paint, he gazed down with eager eyes into the dark, damp hole, which reeked of mould, shoemakers' wax and musty leather. There, at the bottom of it, two figures were jerking about in a fury, screaming hoarsely, groaning and cursing.

"You'll kill me...." warned the woman, with a sigh.

"N-ne-ever m-mind!"—her husband soothed her confidently, and with concentrated venom.

Dull, heavy blows on some soft object resounded, sighs, piercing screams, the strained groaning of a man who is moving about a heavy weight.

"Oh my! I-is-n't he just giving it to her with the last!" said Tchízhik with a lisp, illustrating the course of events in the cellar, while the audience which had gathered around him—tailors, messenger of the courts Levtchénko, Kislyakóff the accordeon-player, and others who were fond of gratuitous entertainments—kept asking Sénka, pulling, in their impatience, at his legs and little breeches all impregnated with greasy paints:

"Well? What's going on now? What's he doing to her?"

"He's sitting astride of her, and banging her snout against the floor," reported Sénka, curling up voluptuously with the impressions which he was experiencing.

[Pg 5]

The spectators bent over also, to the Orlóffs' windows, being seized with a burning desire to see all the details of the fight for themselves; and although they had long known the ways which Grísha[2] Orlóff employed in his war with his wife, still they expressed surprise:

[2] Grísha and Gríshka are the diminutives of Grigóry.—Translator.

"Akh, the devil! Has he smashed her up?"

"Her nose is all bloody ... and he keeps on banking her!" reported Sénka, choking with delight.

"Akh, Lord my God!" cried the women.—"Akh, the tormenting-monster!"

The men judged more objectively.

"Without fail, he'll beat her to death!" said they.

And the accordeon-player announced in the tone of a seer:

"Remember my words—he'll disembowel her with a knife! One of these days he'll get tired of cutting up in this fashion, and he'll put an end to the music at one blow!"

"He's done!" reported Sénka, springing up from the ground, and bounding away like a ball from the windows, to one side, to a nook where he took up another post of observation, being aware that Grísha Orlóff would immediately emerge into the court-yard.

The spectators rapidly dispersed, as they did not care to fall under the eye of the savage shoemaker; now that the battle was over, he had lost all interest in their eyes, and he was decidedly dangerous, to boot.

And generally, there was not a living soul in the courtyard except Sénka, when Orlóff made his appearance from his cellar. Breathing heavily, in a torn shirt, with his hair rumpled all over his head, with scratches on his perspiring and excited face, he scrutinized the court-yard with[Pg 6] a sidelong glance, with eyes suffused with blood, and clasping his hands behind his back, he walked slowly to an old carrier's sledge, which lay with runners upward, against the wall of the wood-shed. Sometimes he whistled valiantly as he did so, and stared about in all directions exactly as though he had the intention of challenging the entire population of the Petúnnikoff house to a fight. Then he seated himself on the runners of the sledge, wiped the blood and sweat from his face with his shirt-sleeve, and fell into a fatigued attitude, gazing dully at the wall of the house, which was dirty with peeling stucco and decorated with motley-hued stripes of paint,—as Sutchkóf's painters, on their return from work, had a habit of cleaning their brushes against that part of the wall.

Orlóff was about thirty years of age. His bronzed, nervous face, with delicate features, was adorned with a small, dark mustache, which sharply shaded his full, red lips. His eyebrows almost met above his large, cartilaginous nose; from beneath them gazed black eyes which always blazed uneasily. His curly hair, tangled in front, fell behind over a sinewy, light-brown neck. Of medium stature, and somewhat round-shouldered from his work, muscular and ardent, he sat for a long time on the sledge, in a sort of benumbed condition, and surveyed the paint-bedaubed wall, breathing deeply with his healthy, swarthy breast.

The sun had already set, but it was stifling in the courtyard; it smelled of oil-paints, tar, sour cabbage, and something rotten. From all the windows in both stories of the house which opened on the court-yard, poured songs and scolding; from time to time someone's intoxicated countenance inspected Orlóff for a minute, being thrust forth from behind a window-jamb and withdrawn with a laugh.

The painters made their appearance from their work;[Pg 7] as they passed Orlóff they cast furtive glances at him, exchanging winks among themselves, and filling the courtyard with the lively dialect of Kostromá, they made ready to go out, some to the bath, some to the pot-house. From above, from the second story, tailors crept out into the court—a half-clad, consumptive and bow-legged lot of men—and began to make fun of the Kostromá painters for their mode of speech, which rattled about like peas. The whole court was filled with noise, with daring, lively laughter, with jests.... Orlóff sat in his corner and maintained silence, not even casting a glance at anyone. No one approached him, and no one could make up his mind to ridicule him, for everyone knew that now he was—a raging wild beast.

He sat there, the prey to a dull and heavy wrath, which oppressed his breast, made breathing difficult, and his nostrils quivered rapaciously from time to time while his lips curled in a snarl, laying bare two rows of large, strong, yellow teeth. Within him something dark and formless was springing up, red, turbid spots swam before his eyes, grief and a thirst for vódka sucked at his entrails. He knew that he would feel better when he had had a drink, but it was still daylight, and it mortified him to go to the dram-shop in such a tattered and disreputable condition through the street where everybody knew him, Grigóry Orlóff.

He knew his own value, and did not wish to go out as a general laughing-stock, but neither could he go home to wash and dress himself. There, on the floor, lay his wife whom he had unmercifully beaten, and now she was repulsive to him in every way.

She was groaning there, and he felt that she was a martyr, and that she was right, so far as he was concerned—[Pg 8]he knew that. He knew, also, that she was really in the right, and he was to blame, but this still further augmented his hatred toward her, because, along with this consciousness a dark, evil feeling was seething in his soul, and it was more powerful than the consciousness. Everything within him was heavy and confused, and, without any exertion of his will, he gave himself over to the weight of his inward sensations, unable to disentangle them, and knowing that nothing but half a bottle of vódka would afford him relief.

Now Kislyakóff the accordeon-player comes along. He is clad in a sleeveless cotton-velvet jacket, over a red silk shirt, with voluminous trousers tucked into dandified boots. Under his arm is his accordeon in a green bag, the ends of his small black mustache are twisted into arrows, his cap is set dashingly on one side, and his whole countenance is beaming with audacity and jollity. Orlóff loves him for his audacity, for his playing, and for his merry character, and envies him his easy, care-free life.

"Congratulations, Grísha,[3] on your vi-ic-to-ory,
And on your well-scra-a-atched cheek!"

[3] See footnote, p. 5.

Orlóff did not fly into a rage with him for this joke, although he had already heard it fifty times, and besides, the accordeon-player did not say it out of malice, but simply because he was fond of joking.

"What now, brother! Had another Plevna?"—asked Kislyakóff, halting for a minute in front of the shoemaker.

"Ekh, Grísha, you're a ripe melon! You ought to go where the road for all of us lies.... You and I might have a bite together..[Pg 9]..'

"I'm coming soon...." said Orlóff, without raising his head.

"I'll wait and suffer for you...."

And before long, Orlóff went off after him.

Then, from the cellar emerged a small, plump woman, clinging to the wall as she went. Her head wad closely enveloped in a kerchief, and from the aperture over the face, only one eye, and a bit of the cheek and forehead peeped out. She walked, staggering, across the court, and seated herself on the same spot where her husband had been sitting not long before. Her appearance surprised no one—they had got used to it, and everybody knew that there she would sit until Grísha, intoxicated and in a repentant mood, should make his appearance from the dram-shop. She came out into the court, because it was suffocating in the cellar, and for the purpose of leading drunken Grísha down the stairs. The staircase was half-decayed, and steep; Grísha had tumbled down it one day, and had sprained his wrist, so that he had not worked for a fortnight, and, during that time, they had pawned nearly all their chattels to feed themselves.

From that time forth, Matréna had kept watch for him.

Now and then someone from the court would sit down beside her. Most frequently of all, the person who did so was Levtchénko, a mustached non-commissioned officer on the retired list, an argumentative and sedate Little Russian, with close-cut hair and a blue nose. He would seat himself, and inquire, with a yawn:

"Been banging each other round again?"

"What's that to you?" said Matréna, in a hostile and irritable manner.

"Oh, nothing!" explained the Little Russian, and after that, neither of them spoke again for a long time.

[Pg 10]

Matryóna breathed heavily, and there was a rattling in her chest.

"Why are you always fighting? What scores have you to settle?"—the Little Russian would begin to argue.

"That's our affair...." said Matréna Orlóff curtly.

"That's so, it is your affair...." assented Levtchénko, and he even nodded his head in confirmation of what had been said.

"Then what are you poking your nose into my business for?" argued Mrs. Orlóff[4] logically.

[4] "Mrs. Orlóff" is rather a stiff rendering of the feminine form "Orlóva," minus all prefix, which is not at all disrespectful in Russian, but is somewhat confusing in English.—Translator.

"Phew ... what a touchy woman you are! One can't say a word to you! As I look at it—you and Grísha are a well-matched pair! He ought to give you a good drubbing with a club every day—morning and night—that's what he ought! Then neither of you would be such hedge-hogs...."

And off he went, in a towering rage, which thoroughly pleased her:—for a long time past, a rumor had been going the rounds of the court-yard, to the effect that the Little Russian was not making up to her for nothing, and she was angry with him, with him and with all people who intruded themselves on other folks' affairs. But the Little Russian walked off to the corner of the court with his upright, soldierly gait, alert and strong despite his forty years.

Then Tchízhik bobbed up under his feet from somewhere or other.

"She's a bitter radish too, that Aunty Orlíkha!" he confided to Levtchénko, in an undertone, with a sly wink in the direction where Matréna was sitting.

"Well, I'll prescribe that sort of a radish for you, when[Pg 11] you need one!" threatened the Little Russian, laughing behind his mustache. He was fond of impudent Tchízhik, and listened attentively to him, being aware that all the secrets of the court-yard were known to Tchízhik.

"You can't do any fishing round her,"—explained Tchízhik, paying no attention to the threat.—"Maxím the painter tried it, and bang! she let fly such a slap in the face at him! I heard it myself ... a healthy whack! Straight in his ugly face ... just as though it had been a drum!"

Half-child, half-man, in spite of his fifteen years, lively and impressionable, he eagerly absorbed, like a sponge, the dirt of the life around him, and on his brow there was a thin wrinkle, which showed that Sénka Tchízhik was given to thinking.

... It was dark in the court-yard. Above it shone a quadrangular bit of blue sky, all glittering with stars, and surrounded by lofty roofs, so that the court seemed to be a deep pit, when one looked up out of it. In one corner of this pit sat a tiny female form, resting after her beating, and awaiting her drunken husband....

*

The Orlóffs had been married three years. They had had a child, but after living for about a year and a half, it died; neither of them mourned it long, being consoled with the hope that they would have another. The cellar, in which they had taken up their abode, was a large, long, dark room with a vaulted ceiling. Directly at the door stood a huge Russian stove, facing the windows; between it and the wall a narrow passage led into a square space, lighted by two windows, which opened on the court-yard. The light fell through them into the cellar in slanting, turbid streaks, and the atmosphere in the room was damp,[Pg 12] dull, dead life pulsated somewhere, tar away, up above, but only faint, ill-defined sounds of it were wafted hither, and fell, together with the dust, into the Orlóffs' hole, in a sort of formless, colorless flakes. Opposite the stove, against the wall, stood a wooden double-bed, with print curtains of a cinnamon-brown dotted with pink flowers; opposite the bed, against the other wall, was a table, on which they drank tea and dined; and between the bed and the wall, the husband and wife worked, in the two streaks of light.

Cockroaches travelled indolently over the walls, feeding on the bread-crumbs with which various little pictures from old newspapers were stuck to the plaster; melancholy flies flitted about everywhere, buzzing tiresomely, and the little pictures, which they had covered with specks, stood out like dark spots against the dirty-gray background of the walls.

The Orlóffs' day began after this fashion: at six o'clock in the morning, Matréna awoke, washed herself, and prepared the samovár, which had more than once been crippled in the heat of battle, and was covered all over with patches of lead. While the samovár was coming to a boil, she put the room in order, went to the shop,[5] then roused her husband; he rose, washed himself, and the samovár was already standing on the table, hissing and purring. They sat down to drink tea, with white bread, of which, together, they ate a pound.

[5] In Russian towns, people go or send, every morning, to the shops for bread, cream, butter.—Translator.

Grigóry worked well, and he always had work; after tea he portioned it out. He did the fine work, which required the hand of a master, his wife prepared the waxed ends, pasted in the linings, put on the outside layer on the heels,[Pg 13] and did other trifling jobs of that sort. After tea, they discussed their dinner. In winter, when it was necessary to eat more, this was a tolerably interesting question; in summer, from economy, they heated the oven only on feast-days, and not always then, feeding themselves chiefly on a cold dish made of kvas,[6] with the addition of onions, salt-fish, sometimes of meat, boiled in the oven of someone in the court-yard. When they had finished their tea, they sat down to work: Grigóry on a small kneading-trough, covered with leather, and with a crack in the side, his wife by his side, on a low bench.

[6] A tart, non-intoxicating, liquor—thin beer—made by fermenting sour rye bread, or rye meal. Sometimes raisins, straw or watermelon juice are used to flavor it.—Translator.

At first they worked in silence,—what had they to talk about? They exchanged a couple of words about their work, and maintained silence for half an hour, or more, at a stretch. The hammer tapped, the waxed-ends hissed, as they were drawn through the leather. Grigóry yawned from time to time, and invariably concluded his yawn with a prolonged roar or howl. Matréna sighed and held her peace. Sometimes Orlóff started a song. He had a sharp voice, with a metallic ring, but he knew how to sing. The words of the song were arranged in a swift, plaintive recitative, and now burst impetuously from Grigóry's breast, as though afraid to finish what they wished to say, now, all of a sudden, lengthened out into mournful sighs, or—with a wail of "ekh!"—flew in loud, melancholy strains, through the windows into the court. Matréna sang an accompaniment to her husband, with her soft contralto. The faces of both grew pensive, and sad, Grísha's dark eyes became dimmed with moisture. His wife, absorbed in the sounds, seemed to grow stupid, and sat as though[Pg 14] half-dozing, swaying from side to side, and sometimes the song seemed to choke her, and she broke off in the middle of a note, and then went on with it, in harmony with her husband. Neither of them was conscious of the presence of the other while they were singing, and striving to pour forth in the words of others the emptiness and dulness of their gloomy life; perhaps they wished to give expression, in these words, to the half-conscious thoughts and sensations, which sprang into life in their souls.

At times Gríshka improvised:

"E-okh, thou life,... ekh, yea, thou, my thrice-accursed life....
And thou, oh grief! Ekh, and thou, my cursed grief,
Maledictions on thee, gri-i-ief!..."

Matréna did not like these improvisations, and, on such occasions, she generally asked him:

"Why are you howling, like a dog before a corpse?"

For some reason, he instantly flew into a rage with her:

"You blunt-snouted pig! What can you understand? You marsh-spectre!"

"He howled, and howled, and now he has taken to barking...."

"Your business is to hold your tongue! Who am I—your foreman, I'd like to know, that you meddle and read me lectures, hey?.... Just so!"

Matréna, perceiving that the sinews of his neck were becoming tense, and that his eyes were blazing with wrath, held her peace, held it for a long time, demonstratively evading a reply to the questions of her husband, whose wrath died out as rapidly as it had flared up.

She turned away from his glances, which sought reconciliation with her, awaited her smiles, and was completely filled with a palpitating feeling of fear, lest he should fly[Pg 15] into a passion with her again for this play of hers with him. But, at the same time, she was incensed at him, and was greatly pleased to observe his efforts to make peace with her,—for this signified living, thinking, experiencing agitation.

They were both of them young and healthy, they loved each other, and were proud of each other.... Gríshka was so strong, ardent, handsome, and Matréna was white, plump, with a spark of fire in her gray eyes,—"a buxom woman," as they called her in the court-yard. They loved each other, but their life was so tiresome, they had hardly any interests and impressions which could, occasionally, afford them the possibility of getting a rest from each other, and might have satisfied the natural demand of the human soul—to feel excitement, to think, to glow—in short, to live. For under such conditions of lack of external impressions and interests which lend a zest to life, husband and wife—even when they are persons of highly cultivated minds—are bound, inevitably, to become repulsive to each other. This law is as inevitable as it is just. If the Orlóffs had had an aim in life, even so limited an aim as the amassing of money, penny by penny, they would, undoubtedly, in that case, have got along better together.

But they had not even that.

Being constantly under each other's eye, they had grown used to each other, knew each other's every word and gesture. Day after day passed by, and brought into their life nothing which might have diverted their attention. Sometimes, on holidays, they went to visit others as poor in spirit as themselves, and sometimes visitors came to see them, ate, drank and, frequently—fought. And then again the colorless days dragged by, like the links of an invisible[Pg 16] chain of toil which burdened the lives of these people, of tediousness, and senseless irritation against each other.

Sometimes Gríshka said:

"What a life—a witch is its grandmother! And why was it ever given to me? Work and tediousness, tediousness and work...." And after a pause, with eyes cast upward toward the ceiling, and a wavering smile, he resumed:—"My mother bore me, by the will of God ... there's no gainsaying that! I learned my trade ... and why? Weren't there shoemakers enough without me? Well, all right, I'm a shoemaker, and what then? What satisfaction is there for me in that?... I sit in a pit and sew.... Then I shall die. Now, there's the cholera coming, they say.... Well, what of that? Grigóry Orlóff lived, made shoes—and died of the cholera. What virtue is there in that? And why was it necessary that I should live, make shoes and die, hey?"

Matréna made no reply, conscious that there was something terrible about her husband's words; but, now and then, she begged him not to utter such words, because they were contrary to God, Who must know how to arrange a man's life. And sometimes, when she was not in good spirits, she sceptically announced to her husband:

"You'd better stop drinking liquor—then you'd find life more cheerful, and such thoughts wouldn't creep into your head. Other folks live,—they don't complain, and they hoard up a little pile of money, and with it set up their own work-shops, and then they live after their own hearts, like lords!"

"And you come out with those nonsensical words of yours, you devil's doll! Use your brains—can I help drinking, if that is my only joy? Others! How many such successful folks do you know? And was I like that[Pg 17] before my marriage? If you speak according to your conscience, it's you who are sucking me, and harassing my life.... Ugh, you toad!"

Matréna was angered, but felt that her husband was right. In a state of intoxication he was jolly and amiable,—the other people were the fruit of her imagination,—and he had not been like that before his marriage. He had been a jolly fellow then, engaging and kind. And now he had become a regular wild beast.

"Why is it so? Am I really a burden to him?" she thought.

Her heart contracted at that bitter reflection, she felt sorry for herself, and for him; she went up to him, and caressingly, affectionately gazing into his eyes, pressed close to his breast.

"Well, now you're going to lick yourself, you cow ...." said Gríshka surlily, and pretended that he wished to thrust her from him; but she knew that he would not do it, and pressed closer and harder against him.

Then his eyes flashed, he flung his work on the floor, and setting his wife on his knees, he kissed her much and long, sighing from a full heart, and saying, in a low voice, as though afraid that someone would overhear him: "E-ekh, Mótrya![7] A?, a?, how ill you and I live together ... we snarl at each other like wild beasts ... and why? Such is my star ... a man is born beneath a star, and the star is his fate!"

[7] Mótrya is the diminutive for Matréna.—Translator.

But this explanation did not satisfy him, and straining his wife to his breast, he sank into thought.

They sat thus for a long time, in the murky light and close air of their cellar. She held her peace and sighed, but sometimes in such fair moments as these, she recalled the[Pg 18] undeserved insults and beatings administered by him, and with quiet tears she complained to him of them.

Then he, abashed by her fond reproaches, caressed her yet more ardently, and she poured forth her heart in more and more complaints. At last, this irritated him.

"Stop your jawing! How do you know but that it hurts me a thousand times more than it does you when I thrash you. Do you understand? Well, then, stop your noise! Give you and the dike of you free sway, and they'd fly at one's throat. drop the subject. What can you say to a man if life has made a devil of him?"

At other times he softened under the flood of her quiet tears, and passionate remonstrances, and explained, sadly and thoughtfully:

"What am I, with my character, to do? I insult you ... that's true. I know that you and I are one soul—but sometimes I forget that. Do you understand, Mótrya, that there are times when I can't bear the sight of you?! Just as though I had had a surfeit of you. And, at such times, such a vicious feeling comes up under my heart—I could tear you to bits, and myself along with you. And the more in the right you are, as against me, the more I want to thrash you...."

She hardly understood him, but the repentant, affectionate tone soothed her.

"God grant, that we may get straight somehow, that we may get used to each other"—she said, not recognizing the fact that they had long ago got used to each other, and had drained each other.

"Now, if we only had had some children born to us—we should get along better," she sometimes added, with a sigh.—"We should have had an amusement, and an anxiety."

[Pg 19]

"Well, what ails you? Bear some...."

"Yes ... you see, I can't bear any, with these thrashings of yours. Yon beat me awfully hard on the body and ribs.... If only you wouldn't use your feet on me...."

"Come now,—" Grigóry gruffly and in confusion defended himself,—"can a man stop to consider at such a time, where and with what he ought to thrash? And I'm not the hangman, either,... and I don't beat you for my amusement, but from grief...."

"And how was this grief bred in you?"—asked Matréna mournfully.

"Such is my fate, Mótrya!—" philosophized Gríshka. "My fate, and the character of my soul.... Look, am I any worse than the rest, than that Little Russian, for example? Only, the Little Russian lives on and does not feel melancholy. He's alone, he has no wife, nothing I should perish without you.... But he doesn't mind it!... He smokes his pipe and smiles; he's contented, the devil, just because he's smoking his pipe. But I can't do like that.... I was born, evidently, with uneasiness in my heart. That's the sort of character I have.... The Little Russian's is—like a stick, but mine is like—a spring; when you press it, it shakes.... I go out, for instance, into the street, I see this thing, that thing, a third thing, but I have nothing myself. This angers me. The Little Russian—he wants nothing, but I get mad, also, because he, that mustached devil, doesn't want anything, while I.... I don't even know what I want ... everything! So there now! Here I sit in a hole, and work all the time, and have nothing. And there, again, it's your fault.... You're my wife, and what is there about you that's[Pg 20] interesting? One womans just like another woman, with the whole lot of females.... I know everything in you; how you will sneeze to-morrow—and I know it, because you have sneezed before me a thousand times, probably..... And so what sort of life, and what interest can I have? There's no interest. Well, and so I go and sit in the dram-shop, because it's cheerful there."

"But why did you marry?"—asked Matréna.

"Why?"—Gríshka laughed.—"The devil knows why I did.... I oughtn't to have done it, to tell the truth. It would have been better to start out as a tramp.... Then, if you are hungry, you're free—go where you like! March all over the world!"

"Then go, and set me at liberty," blurted out Matréna, on the verge of bursting into tears.

"Where are you going?"—inquired Gríshka insinuatingly.

"That's my business."

"Whe-ere?" and his eyes lighted up with an evil glare. "Say!"

"Don't yell—I'm not afraid of you...."

"Have you got your eye on somebody else? Say?"

"Let me go!"

"Let you go where?"—bellowed Gríshka.

He had already grasped her by the hair, pushing the kerchief off her head. Beatings exasperated her, but anger afforded her immense delight, stirring up her whole soul, and, instead of extinguishing his jealousy by a couple of words, she proceeded still further to enrage him, smiling up into his face with strange, extremely significant smiles. He flew into a fury, and beat her, beat her mercilessly.

But at night when, all broken, and crushed, she lay groaning beside him in bed, he stared askance at her, and[Pg 21] sighed heavily. He felt ill at ease, his conscience tortured him, he understood that there was no foundation for his jealousy, and that he had beaten her without cause.

"Come, that will do,..." he said abashed.—"Am I to blame, if I have that sort of character? And you're nice, too.... Instead of persuading me—you spur me on. Why did you find it necessary to do it?"

She held her peace, but she knew why, knew that now, all beaten and wronged as she was, she might expect his caresses, the passionate and tender caresses of reconciliation. For this she was ready to pay every day with pain in her bruised sides.—And she was already weeping, with the mere joy of anticipation, even before her husband succeeded in touching her.

"Come, enough of that, Mótrya! Come, my darling, won't you? Have done, forgive me, do!"—He smoothed her hair, kissed her, and gnashed his teeth with the bitterness which filled his whole being.

Their windows were open, but the main wall of the neighboring house hid the sky, and in their room, as always, it was dark, and stifling and close.

"Ekh, life! Thou art a magnificent hard-labor prison!"—whispered Gríshka, unable to express what he so painfully felt.—"It comes from this hole, Mótrya. What are we? Something as though we were buried in the earth before our death...."

"Let's move into another lodging,"—suggested Matréna, through sweet tears, understanding his words literally.

"E-ekh! No you don't, aunty! If you betake yourself to a garret, you'll still be in a hole,... it isn't the lodging that's the hole ... but life—that's the hole!"

[Pg 22]

Matréna reflected, and began again:

"God willing, we may reform ourselves ... we shall get used to one another."

"Yes, we'll reform.... You often say that.... But it doesn't look like reform with us.... The rows get more frequent all the time,—understand?"

That was unqualifiedly true. The intervals between their fights kept growing shorter and shorter, and here, at last, every Saturday, Gríshka began from early in the morning to screw himself up into a hostile mood against his wife.

"This evening I'm going to cut work, and go to meet Lysy in the dram-shop.... I shall get drunk...." he announced.

Matréna, puckering up her eyes strangely, made no reply.

"You won't speak? Well then, just go on holding your tongue—it'll be better for your health,—" he said warningly.

In the course of the day, with irritation which increased in proportion as the evening drew near,—he reminded her several times of his intention to get drunk, was conscious that it pained her to hear this, and perceiving that she maintained a persistent silence, with a firm gleam in her eyes, preparing for the struggle, he strode about the room and raged all the more furiously.

In the evening, the herald of their unhappiness, Sénka Tchízhik, proclaimed the "brattle."[8]

[8] Sénka twists his words, in a way which cannot always be reproduced. This is a fair specimen.—Translator.

When he had finished beating his wife, Gríshka vanished, sometimes for the whole night, sometimes he did not even put in an appearance on Sunday. She, covered[Pg 23] with bruises, greeted him morosely, with taciturnity, but was filled with concealed compassion for him, all tattered, and often battered also, in filth, with his eyes suffused with blood.

She knew that he must get over his fit of intoxication, and she had already supplied herself with half a bottle of vódka. He, also, knew this.

"Give me a little glass...." he entreated hoarsely, drank off two or three glasses, and sat down to his work. The day passed with him in gnawings of conscience; often he could not endure their sting, flung aside his work, and swore terrible oaths, as he rushed about the room, or threw himself on the bed. Mótrya gave him time to simmer down, and then they made peace.

Formerly, this reconciliation had had much that was subtle and sweet about it, but, in the course of time, all this evaporated, and they made peace almost for the sole reason that it was not convenient to remain silent for the five whole days before Sunday.

"You feel sleepy," said Matréna, with a sigh.

"I do,"—assented Gríshka, and spat aside, with the air of a man to whom it is a matter of utter indifference whether he feels sleepy or not.—"And you're going to scamper off and leave me...." he completed the picture of the future, looking searchingly into her eyes. For some time past, she had taken to dropping them, which she had never been in the habit of doing previously, and Gríshka, taking note of this, frowned portentously, and softly gritted his teeth. But, privily from her husband, she was still frequenting the fortune-tellers and sorceresses, bringing back from them spells, in the form of roots and embers. And when all this was of no avail, she had a prayer-service celebrated to the holy great-martyr[Pg 24] Vonifánty, who aids drunkards, and as she knelt throughout the prayer-service, she wept burning tears, noiselessly moving her quivering lips.

And more and more frequently did she feel toward her husband a savage, cold hatred, which aroused black thoughts within her, and she had ever less and less of pity for this man who, three years before, had so enriched her life with his merry laughter, his caresses, his affectionate speeches.

Thus these people, in reality, not at all a bad sort of people, lived on, day after day—lived on, fatally anticipating something which should finally smash to atoms their torturingly-foolish life.

*

One Monday morning, when the Orlóff pair had just begun to drink their tea, the impressive form of a policeman made its appearance on the threshold of the door which led into their cheerless abode. Orlóff sprang from his seat and, with a glance of reproachful alarm at his wife, as he endeavored to reconstruct in his fuddled head the events of the last few days, he stared silently and fixedly at the visitor, with troubled eyes, filled with the most horrible expectation.

"Here, this is the place,—" the policeman invited someone in.

"It's as dark as the pool under the mill-wheel, devil take merchant Petúnnikoff,—" rang out a young, cheerful voice. Then the policeman stood aside, and into the Orlóffs' room there stepped briskly a student, in a white duck coat, cap in hand, with close-cut hair, a large, sun-burned forehead, and merry brown eyes, which sparkled laughingly from beneath his spectacles.

"Good morning!—" he exclaimed in a bass voice which[Pg 25] had not yet grown hoarse.—"I have the honor to introduce myself—the sanitary officer! I have come to investigate how you live ... and to smell your air ... your air is thoroughly foul!"

Orlóff breathed freely and cordially, and smiled cheerily. He took an instantaneous liking to this noisy student: the fellow's face was so healthy, rosy, kindly, covered on cheeks and chin with golden-brown down. It smiled incessantly, with a peculiar, fresh and clear smile, which seemed to render the Orlóffs' cellar brighter and more cheerful.

"Well then, Mr. and Mrs. Occupant!"—said the student without a pause,—"you must empty your slop-bucket more frequently, that unsavory smell comes from it. I would advise you, aunty, to wash it out very often, and also to sprinkle unslaked lime in the corners, to purify the air ... and lime is also good as a remedy for dampness. And why have you so bored an aspect, uncle?"—he addressed himself to Orlóff, and immediately seizing him by the hand, he began to feel his pulse.

The student's audacity stunned the Orlóffs. Matréna smiled abstractedly, surveying him in silence. Grigóry also smiled, as he admired his vivacious face, with its golden-brown down.

"How are your little bellies feeling?—" inquired the student. "Tell me, without ceremony ... it's a matter of health, and if there's anything out of order, we'll furnish you with some acid medicines, which will remove all trouble at once."

"We're all right ... we're in good health,—"Grigóry finally imparted the information, with a laugh.—"But if I don't look just as I should ... it's only on the outside ... for, to tell the truth, I haven't quite got over my drunk."

[Pg 26]

"Exactly so, I discern with my nose that you, my good man, almost got drunk yesterday—just a mere trifle, you know...."

He said this so humorously, and made such a grimace, to accompany it, that Orlóff fairly split with loud and confidential laughter. Matréna laughed also, covering her mouth with her apron. The student himself laughed the most loudly and merrily of all, and he also stopped sooner than the rest. And when the folds of skin around his chubby mouth, evoked by the laughter, had smoothed themselves out,—his simple, frank face became still more simple, somehow.

"It's the proper thing for a working man to drink, if he does it moderately, but just at present, it would be better to refrain from liquor altogether. Have you heard how some sickness or other is going about among the people?"

And now, with a serious aspect, he began to explain in intelligible language to the Orlóffs, about the cholera, and about the means of fighting it. As he talked, he walked about the room, now feeling of the wall with his hand, now casting a glance behind the door, into the corner, where hung the wash-basin, and where stood a wash-trough[9] filled with slops, and he even bent down and smelled under the stove, to see what the odor was like. His voice broke, every now and then, from bass notes into tenor notes, and the simple words of his remarks seemed to fix themselves firmly, one after another, in the minds [Pg 27] of his hearers, without any effort on their part. His bright eyes sparkled, and he seemed thoroughly permeated with the ardor of his youthful passion for his work, which he executed so simply and so vigorously.

[9] The peasant wash-basin consists of a dosed vessel which is suspended from the wall, and contains water. The water trickles through a spout or faucet, on the hands—"running" water being regarded as the only clean water. The tub in which clothes are washed is a long trough, rounded at the bottom, and mounted on supports.—Translator.

Grigóry watched his operations with a smile of curiosity. Matréna sniffed from time to time; the policeman had disappeared.

"So you are to attend to the lime to-day, Mr. and Mrs. Occupant. There's a building going up alongside you, so the masons will give you all you need for about five kopéks. And as for you, good man, if you can't be moderate in your drinking, you must let it alone altogether.... We-ell, good-by for the time being.... I'll look in on you again."

And he vanished as swiftly as he had appeared, leaving as mementos of his laughing eyes abashed and satisfied smiles on the countenances of the Orlóff couple.

They remained silent for a minute, staring at each other, and as yet unable to formulate the impression left by this unexpected invasion of conscious energy into their dark, automatic life.

"A-a?!—" drawled Grigóry, shaking his head.—"So there's ... a chemist! It is said that they are poisoning folks! But would a man with a face like that occupy himself with that sort of thing? And then again, his voice! And all the rest.... No, his manner was perfectly frank, and immediately—'here now,—here I am!'—Lime ... is that injurious? Citric acid ... what's that? Simply acid, and nothing more! But the chief point is—cleanliness everywhere, in the air, and on the floor, and in the slop-bucket.... Is it possible to poison a man by such means? Akh, the devils! Poisoners, say they.... That hard-working young fellow,[Pg 28] hey? Fie! A workingman ought always to drink in moderation, he says ... do you hear, Mótrya? So come now, pour me out a little glass ... there's liquor on hand, isn't there?"

She very willingly poured him out half a cup of vódka from the bottle, which she produced from some place known only to herself.

"That was really a nice fellow ... he had such a way of making one like him,—" she said, smiling at the remembrance of the student.—"But other fellows, the rest of them—who knows anything about them? Perhaps, they actually are engaged...."

"But engaged for what, and again, by whom?—" exclaimed Grigóry.

"To exterminate the people.... They say there are so many poor folks, that an order has been issued—to poison the superfluous ones,"—Matréna communicated her information.

"Who says that?"

"Everybody says so.... The painters' cook said so, and a great many other folks...."

"Well, they're fools! Would that be profitable? Just consider: they are curing them! How is a body to understand that? They bury them! And isn't that a loss? For a coffin is needed, and a grave, and other things of that sort.... Everything is charged to the government treasury.... Stuff and nonsense! If they wanted to make a clearing-out and to reduce the number of people, they would have taken and sent them off to Siberia—there's plenty of room for them all there! Or to some uninhabited islands.... And after they had exiled them, they would have ordered them to work there. Work and pay your taxes ... understand? There's a clearing-out[Pg 29] for you, and a very profitable one, to boot.... Because an uninhabited island will yield no revenue, if it isn't settled with people. And revenue is the first thing to the public treasury, so it's not to its interest to destroy folks, and to bury them at its expense.... Understand? And then, again, that student ... he's an impudent creature, that's a fact, but he had more to say about the riot; but kill people off,... no-o, you couldn't hire him to do that for any amount of pennies! Couldn't you see at a glance, that he wouldn't be capable of such a thing? His phiz wasn't of that calibre...."

All day long they talked about the student, and about everything he had told them. They recalled the sound of his laugh, his face, discovered that one button was missing from his white coat, and came near quarrelling over the question: 'on which side of the breast?' Matréna obstinately maintained that it was on the right side, her husband said—on the left, and twice cursed her stoutly, but remembering in season, that his wife had not turned the bottle bottom upward when she poured the vódka into the cup, he yielded the point to her. Then they decided that on the morrow, they would set to work to introduce cleanliness into their quarters, and again inspired by a breath of something fresh, they resumed their discussion of the student.

"Yes, what a go-ahead fellow he was, really now!"—said Grigóry rapturously.—"He came in, just exactly as though he'd known us for ten years.... He sniffed about everywhere, explained everything ... and that was all! He didn't shout or make a row, although he's one of the authorities, also, of course.... Akh, deuce take him! Do you understand, Matréna, they're looking after us there, my dear. That's evident at once....[Pg 30] They want to keep us sound, and nothing more, nor less .... That's all nonsense about killing us off ... old wives' tales.... 'How does your belly act?' says he.... And if they wanted to kill us off, what the devil should he have wanted to know about the action of my belly for? And how cleverly he explained all about those ... what's their name? those devils that crawl about in the bowels, you know?"

"Something after the fashion of cock and bull stories," laughed Matréna,—"I believe he only said that for the sake of frightening us, and making folks more particular to keep clean...."

"Well, who knows, perhaps there's some truth in that for worms breed from dampness.... Akh, you devil! What did he call those little bugs? It isn't a cock and bull story at all, but ... why, I remember what it is!... I've got the word on the tip of my tongue, but I don't understand...."

And when they lay down to sleep, they were still talking about the event of the day, with the same ingenuous enthusiasm with which children communicate to one another their first experiences and the impressions which have surprised them. Then they fell asleep, in the midst of their discussion.

Early in the morning they were awakened. By their bedside stood the fat cook of the painters, and her face, which was always red, now, contrary to her wont, was gray and drawn.

"Why are you pampering yourselves?" she said hastily, making a rather peculiar noise with her thick, red lips.—"We've got the cholera in the court-yard.... The Lord has visited us!"—and she suddenly burst out crying.

"Akh, you're ... lying, aren't you?" cried Grigóry.

[Pg 31]

"And I never carried out the slop-bucket last night," said Matréna guiltily.

"My dear folks, I'm going to get my wages. I'm going away.... I'll go, and go ... to the country," said the cook.

"Who's got it?" inquired Grigóry, getting out of bed.

"The accordeon-player! He's got it.... He drank water out of the fountain last evening, do you hear, and he was seized in the night.... And it took him right in the belly, my good people, as though he'd swallowed rat-poison...."

"The accordeon-player...." muttered Grigóry. He could not believe that any disease could overcome the accordeon-player. Such a jolly, dashing young fellow, and he had walked through the court like a peacock, as usual, only last night.—"I'll go and take a look,"—Orlóff decided, with an incredulous laugh.

Both women shrieked in affright:

"Grísha, why, it's catching!"

"What are you thinking of, my good man, where axe you going?"

Grigóry uttered a violent oath, thrust his legs into his trousers, and dishevelled as he was, with shirt-collar unbuttoned, went toward the door. His wife clutched him by the shoulder, from behind, he felt her hands tremble, and suddenly flew into a rage, for some reason or other.

"I'll hit you in the snout! Get away!"—he roared, and went out, after striking his wife in the breast.

The court-yard was dark and deserted, and Grigóry, as he proceeded toward the accordeon-player's door, was simultaneously conscious of a chill of terror, and of a keen satisfaction at the fact that he, alone, out of all the denizens of the house, was going to the sick accordeon-player. This[Pg 32] satisfaction was still further augmented when he perceived that the tailors were watching him from the second-story windows. He even began to whistle, wagging his head about with a dashing air. But a little disenchantment awaited him at the door of the accordeon-player's little den, in the shape of Sénka Tchízhik.

Having opened the door half way, he had thrust his sharp nose into the crack thus formed, and as was his wont, was taking his observations, captivated to such a degree that he did not turn round until Orlóff pulled his ear.

"Just see how it has racked him, Uncle Grigóry," he said in a whisper, raising toward Orlóff his dirty little face, rendered still more peaked than usual by the impressions he had undergone.—"And it's just as though he had shrunk up and got disjointed with dryness—like a bad cask ... by heaven!"

Orlóff, enveloped by the foul air, stood and listened in silence to Tchízhik, endeavoring to peer, with, one eye, through the crack of the door as it hung ajar.

"How would it do to give him some water to drink, Uncle Grigóry?" suggested Tchízhik.

Orlóff glanced at the boy's face, which was excited almost to the point of a nervous tremor, and felt something resembling a burst of excitement within himself.

"Go along, fetch the water!" he ordered Tchízhik, and boldly flinging the door wide open, he halted on the threshold, shrinking back a little.

Athwart the mist in his eyes, Grigóry beheld Kislyakóff:—the accordeon-player, dressed in his best, lay with his breast on the table, which he was clutching tightly with his hands, and his feet, in their lacquered boots, moved feebly over the wet floor.

[Pg 33]

"Who is it?" he asked hoarsely and apathetically, as though his voice had faded, and lost all its color.

Grigóry recovered himself, and stepping cautiously over the floor, he advanced to him, trying to speak bravely and even jestingly.

"I, brother, Mítry Pávloff.... But what are you up to ... did you overwork last night, pray?"—he surveyed Kislyakóff attentively and curiously, and did not recognize him.

The accordeon-player's face had grown peaked all over, his cheek-bones projected in two acute angles, his eyes, deeply sunken in his head, and surrounded by greenish spots, were frightfully immovable and turbid. The skin on his cheeks was of the hue which is seen on corpses in hot summer weather. It was a completely dead, horrible face, and only the slow movement of the jaws showed that it was still alive. Kislyakóff's motionless eyes stared long at Grigóry's face, and their dead gaze put the latter in a fright. Feeling his ribs with his hands, for some reason or other, Orlóff stood three paces distant from the sick man, and felt exactly as though someone were clutching him by the throat with a damp, cold hand,—were clutching him and slowly strangling him. And he wanted to get away, as speedily as possible, from this room, hitherto so bright and comfortable, but now impregnated with a suffocating odor of putrefaction, and with a strange chill.

"Well...." he was about to begin, preparatory to beating a retreat.. But the accordeon-player's gray face began to move in a strange way, his lips, covered with a black efflorescence, parted, and he said with his toneless voice:

"I ... am ... dying...."

The profound indifference, the inexplicable apathy of[Pg 34] his three words echoed in Orlóff's head and breast, like three dull blows. With a senseless grimace on his countenance, he turned toward the door, but Tchízhik came flying to meet him, all flushed and perspiring, with a pail in his hand.

"Here it is ... from Spiridónoff's well ... they wouldn't let me have it, the devils...."

He set the pail on the floor, rushed into a corner, reappeared, and handing a glass to Orlóff, continued to prattle:

"They say you've got the cholera.... I say, well, what of that? You'll have it too,... now it'll run the rounds, as it did in the suburbs...? Whack! he gave me such a bang on the head that I yelled!"

Orlóff took the glass, dipped up water from the pail, and swallowed it at one gulp. In his ears the dead words were ringing:

"I ... am ... dying...."

But Tchízhik hovered round him with swift darts, feeling himself thoroughly in his proper sphere.

"Give me a drink...." said the accordeon-player, moving himself and the table about on the floor.

Tchízhik hopped up to him, and held a glass of water to his black lips. Grigóry, as he leaned against the wall by the door, listened, as in a dream, to the sick man noisily drawing in the water; then he heard Tchízhik propose that they should undress Kislyakóff, and put him to bed, then the voice of the painters' cook rang out. Her broad face, with an expression of terror and compassion, was gazing in from the court-yard through a window, and she said in a snivelling tone:

"You ought to give him lamp-black and rum: a tea-glass full—two spoonfuls of lamp-black, and fill it with rum to the brim."

[Pg 35]

But some invisible person suggested olive-oil with the brine from cucumbers, and aqua regia.

Orlóff suddenly became conscious that the heavy, oppressive gloom within him was illuminated by some memory. He rubbed his brow hard, as though endeavoring to increase the brilliancy of the light, and all at once, he went swiftly thence, ran across the court-yard and disappeared down the street.

"Heavens! And the shoemaker has got it too! He's run off to the hospital,"—the cook commented upon his flight in a plaintively-shrill voice.

Matréna, who was standing beside her, gazed with widely opened eyes, and turning pale, she shook all over.

"You're mistaken," she said hoarsely, barely moving her white lips,—"Grigóry won't fall ill of that accursed sickness.... He won't yield to it...."

But the cook, howling wofully, had already disappeared somewhere, and five minutes later a cluster of neighbors and passers-by was muttering dully around the Petúnnikoff house. Over all faces the same, identical sentiments flitted in turn: excitement, which was succeeded by hopeless dejection, and something evil, which now and then made way for active audacity. Tchízhik kept flying back and forth between the court and the crowd, his bare feet twinkling, and reporting the course of events in the accordeon-player's room.

The public, collected together in a dense knot, filled the dusty, malodorous air of the street with the dull hum of their talk, and from time to time a violent oath, launched at someone, broke forth from their midst,—an oath as malicious as it was lacking in sense.

"Look ... that's Orlóff!"

Orlóff drove up to the gate on the box of a wagon with[Pg 36] a white canvas cover which was driven by a surly man all clad in white, also. This man roared, in a dull bass voice:

"Get out of the way!"

And he drove straight at the people, who sprang aside in all directions at his shout.

The aspect of this wagon, and the shout of its driver, rather subdued the high-strung mood of the spectators,—all seemed to grow dark at once, and many went swiftly away.

In the track of the wagon, the student who had visited the Orlóffs made his appearance from somewhere or other. His cap had fallen back on the nape of his neck, the perspiration streamed down his forehead in large drops, he wore a long mantle, of dazzling whiteness, and the lower part of its front was decorated with a large round hole, with reddish edges, evidently just burned in some way.

"Well, Orlóff, where's the sick man?"—he asked loudly, casting a sidelong glance at the public, which had assembled in a little niche by the gate, and had greeted his appearance with great ill-will, although they watched him not without curiosity.

Someone said, in a loud tone:

"Look at yourself ... you're just like a cook!".

Another voice, which was quieter and had a tinge of malice in it, made promises:

"Just wait ... he'll give you a treat!"

There was a joker in the crowd, as there always is.

"He'll give you such soup that your belly will burst on the spot!"

A laugh rang out, though it was not merry, but obscured by a timorous suspicion, it was not lively, though faces cleared somewhat.

"See, they ain't afraid of catching it themselves ...[Pg 37] what's the meaning of that?"—very significantly inquired a man with a strained face and a glance filled with concentrated wrath.

And under the influence of this question, the countenances of the public darkened again, and their murmurs became still duller....

"They're bringing him!"

"That Orlóff! Akh, the dog!"

"Isn't he afraid?"

"What's it to him? He's a drunkard..

"Carefully, carefully, Orlóff! Lift his feet higher ... so! Ready! Drive off, Piótr!" ordered the student. "Tell the doctor I shall be there soon. Well, sir, Mr. Orlóff, I request that you will help me to exterminate the infection here.... By the way, you will learn how to do it, in case of need.... Do you agree? Can you come?"

"I can," said Orlóff, casting a glance around him, and feeling a flood of pride rising within him.

"And so can I," announced Tchízhik.

He had escorted the mournful wagon through the gate, and returned just in the nick of time to offer his services. The student stared at him through his glasses.

"Who are you, hey?"

"Apprentice ... to the house-painters...." explained Tchízhik.

"And are you afraid of the cholera?"

"I?" asked Sénka in surprise.—"The idea! I'm ... not afraid of anything!"

"Re-eally? That's clever! Now, see here, my friends."—The student seated himself on a cask which was lying on the ground, and rolling himself to and fro on it, he began to say that it was indispensably necessary that[Pg 38] Orlóff and Tchízhik should give themselves a good washing.

They formed a group, which was soon joined by Matréna, smiling timidly. After her came the cook, wiping her wet eyes on her dirty apron. In a short time, several persons from among the spectators approached this group, as cautiously as cats approach sparrows. A small, dense ring of men, about ten in number, formed around the student, and this inspired him. Standing in the centre of these people, and briskly gesticulating, he began something in the nature of a lecture, which now awoke smiles on their faces, now aroused their concentrated attention, now keen distrust and sceptical grins.

"The principal point in all diseases is—cleanliness of the body, and of the air which you breathe, gentlemen,"—he assured his hearers.

"Oh Lord!" sighed the painted cook loudly.—"One must pray to Saint Varvára the martyr to be delivered from sudden death...."

"Gentlemen live in the body and in the air, but still, they die too,"—remarked one of the audience.

Orlóff stood beside his wife, and gazed at the face of the student, pondering something deeply the while. Someone gave his shirt a tug, from one side.

"Uncle Grigóry!"—whispered Sénka Tchízhik, raising himself on tiptoe, his eyes sparkling, blazing like coals,—"now that Mítry Pávlovitch is going to die, and he hasn't any relatives ... who'll get his accordeon?"

"Let me alone, you imp!" Orlóff warded him off.

Sénka stepped aside, and stared through the window of the accordeon-player's little room, searching for something in it with an eager glance.

"Lime, tar,"—the student enumerated loudly.

[Pg 39]

On the evening of that restless day, when the Orlóffs sat down to drink tea, Matréna asked her husband, with curiosity:

"Where did you go with the student a little while ago?"

Grigóry looked into her face with eyes obscured by something, and different from usual, and, without replying, began to pour his tea from his glass into his saucer.

About mid-day, after he had finished scrubbing the accordeon-player's rooms, Grigóry had gone off somewhere with the sanitary officer, had returned at three o'clock thoughtful and taciturn, had thrown himself down on the bed, and there he had lain, face upward, until tea-time, never uttering a single word all that time, although his wife had made many efforts to draw him into conversation. He even failed to swear at her for nagging him, and this, in itself, was strange, she was not used to it, and it provoked her.

With the instinct of a woman whose whole life is bound up in her husband, she began to suspect that her husband had become interested in something new, she was afraid of something, and therefore, was the more passionately desirous of knowing what that thing was.

"Perhaps you don't feel well, Grísha?"

Grigóry poured the last gulp of tea from his saucer into his mouth, wiped his mustache with his hand, pushed his empty glass over to his wife without haste, and knitting his brows, he said:

"I went with the student to the barracks ... yes...."

"To the cholera barracks?" exclaimed Matréna, and tremblingly, with lowered voice, she asked: "are there many of them there?"

"Fifty-three persons, counting in our man...."[Pg 40].."

"Well?"

"They're recovering by the score.... They can walk.... Yellow, thin...."

"Are they cholera-patients too? They're not, I suppose? ... They've put some others in there, to justify themselves: as much as to say—"look, we can cure!'"

"You're a fool!" said Grigóry with decision, and his eyes flashed angrily.—"You're all stupid folks! Lack of education and stupidity—that's all! You're enough to kill a man with your ignorance.... You can't understand anything,"—he sharply moved toward him his glass freshly filled with tea, and fell silent.

"Where did you get so much education?"—inquired Matréna viciously, and sighed.

Her husband, paying not the slightest heed to her words, remained silent, thoughtful and morose. The samovár, which had burned out, drawled a squeaking melody, full of irritating tediousness, an odor of oil-paints, carbolic acid, and stirred-up cesspools floated through the windows from the court-yard. The semi-twilight, the screeching of the samovár, and the smells—everything in the room became densely merged with one another, forming around the Orlóffs a setting which resembled a nightmare, while the dark maw of the oven stared at the husband and wife exactly as though it felt itself called upon to swallow them when a convenient opportunity should present itself. The silence lasted for a long time. Husband and wife nibbled away at their sugar, rattled their crockery, swallowed their tea.[10] Matréna sighed, Grigóry tapped the table with his finger.

[10] By way of economizing, the peasants do not put sugar into their tea, but nibble at it, and thus sweeten their mouths, an inelegant and inconvenient, but highly satisfactory method of operation.—Translator.

[Pg 41]

"You never saw such cleanliness as they have there!"—he suddenly began, irritably.—"All the attendants, down to the very last one—wear white. The sick people keep getting into the bath all the time.... They give them wine ... six bottles and a half! As for the food—the very smell of it would make you feel full-fed.... Care, anxiety.... They treat them in a motherly way..? and all the rest of it.... So they do. Please to understand: you live along upon the earth, and not even one devil would take the trouble to spit on you, much less call in now and then to inquire—what and how and, in general,... what your life is like, that is to say, whether it suits you, or whether it is the right sort for a man? Has he any means of breathing or not? But when you begin to die—they not only do not permit it, but even put themselves to expense. The barracks ... wine ... six bottles and a half! Haven't people any sense? For the barracks and the wine cost a lot of money. Couldn't that same money be used for improving life ... a little every year?"

His wife made no attempt to understand his remarks, it was enough for her to feel that they were new, and thence to deduce, with absolute accuracy, that something new concerning her was also in progress in Grigóry's mind. Convinced of this, she wished to learn, as promptly as possible, how all this concerned her. Fear was mingled with this desire, and hope, and a sort of hostility toward her husband.

"I suppose the people yonder know even more than you do,"—said she, when he had finished, and pursed up her lips in a sceptical way.

Grigóry shrugged his shoulders, cast a furtive glance at her, and then, after a pause, he began in a still more lofty tone:

[Pg 42]

"Whether they know or not, that's their business. But if I have to die, without having seen any sort of life, I can reason about that. Now see here, I'll tell you this: I don't want any more of this sort of thing—that is to say, I won't consent to sit and wait for the cholera to come and seize hold of me. I won't do it! Piótr Ivánovitch says: 'go ahead, and meet it half way! Fate is against you—but you can oppose it,—who'll get the upper hand? It's war! That's all there is to say about it....' So, what now? I'm going to enter the barracks as an orderly—and that's the end of it! Understand? I'm going to walk straight into its maw.—You may swallow me, but I'll make a play with my feet!... I shall not earn any the less there ... twenty rubles a month for wages, and they may add a gratuity besides.... I may die?... that's so, but I should die sooner here. And again, it's a change in my life...." and the excited Orlóff banged the table so vehemently with his fist, that all the crockery bounced up and down with a clatter.

Matréna, at the beginning of her husband's speech, had stared at him with an expression of uneasiness, but by the time he had finished, she had screwed up her eyes in a hostile manner.

"Did the student advise you to do that?" she asked staidly.

"I have wits of my own ... I can judge,"—for some reason, Grigóry evaded a direct reply.

"Well, and did he advise you to separate from me?"—went on Matréna.

"From you?"—Grigóry was somewhat disconcerted—he had not yet succeeded in thinking out that matter. Of course, one can leave a woman in lodgings, as is generally done, but there are different sorts of women.[Pg 43] Matréna, was one of the dangerous sort. One must keep her directly under his eyes. Settling down on this thought, Orlóff went on with a scowl:—"The student ... what ails you? You will live here ... and I shall be earning wages ... ye-es...."

"Just so,"—said the woman briefly and calmly, and laughed with that very significant and purely feminine smile, which is capable of evoking in a man thoughts of jealousy which pierce his heart.

Orlóff, who was nervous and quick of apprehension, felt this, but, being loath to betray himself, out of self-love, he flung at his wife the curt remark:

"Quack and grunt—make up all your speeches...." and he pricked up his ears, in anticipation of what she would say.

But she smiled again, with that exasperating smile, and preserved silence.

"Well, how is it to be?" inquired Grigóry, in a lofty tone.

"How is what to be?" said Matréna, indifferently wiping the cups.

"Viper! None of your shiftiness—I'll damage you!" Orlóff boiled up.—"Perhaps I'm going to my death."

"I'm not sending you ... don't go...." interrupted Matréna.

"You'd be glad to send me off, I know!" exclaimed Orlóff ironically.

She made no reply. Her silence enraged him, but he restrained himself from his customary expression of the feelings which such scenes called forth in him. He restrained himself under the influence of a very venomous thought, as it appeared to him, which flashed through his brain. He even gave vent to a malicious smile. "I know[Pg 44] you'd like to have me tumble down even to the very depths of hell. Well, we shall see which of us comes off best ... yes! I, also, can take such a course—akh, I've no patience with you!"

He sprang up from the table, snatched up his cap from the window-sill, and went off, leaving his wife dissatisfied with her policy, disconcerted by his threats, and with a growing feeling within her of alarm for the future. As she gazed out of the window, she whispered to herself:

"Oh Lord! Queen of Heaven! All-Holy Birth-Giver of God!"

Besieged by a throng of disquieting problems, she remained sitting, for a long time, at the table, endeavoring to foresee what Grigóry would do. Before her stood the cleanly-washed table appurtenances; and on the principal wall of the neighboring house opposite her windows, the setting sun cast a reddish spot; reflected from the white wall, it penetrated into the room, and the edge of the glass sugar-bowl which stood in front of Matréna glittered. She stared at this faint reflection, with contracted brow, until her eyes ached. Then, rising from her chair, she cleared away the dishes and lay down on the bed. She felt disgusted.

Grigóry arrived when it was already entirely dark. From his very footsteps on the stairs she decided that he was in good spirits. He swore at the darkness in the room, called to his wife, approached the bed, and sat down on it. His wife raised herself, and sat beside him.

"Do you know I have something to tell you?"—asked Orlóff, laughing.

"Well, what is it?"

"You are going to take a position also!"

"Where?" she asked, with trembling voice.

[Pg 45]

"In the same barracks with me!" announced Orlóff triumphantly.

She threw her arms round his neck, and clasping him tightly, kissed him straight on the lips. He had not expected this, and thrust her away. She was pretending ... she didn't want to be with him at all, rogue that she was! The viper was pretending, she regarded her husband as a fool....

"What are you delighted about?"—he asked roughly and suspiciously, conscious of a desire to hurl her to the floor.

"Because I am!" she replied, boldly.

"Pretence! I know you!"

"You're my Eruslán the Brave!"[11]

[11] The hero of a seventeenth century Russian fairy-tale, after the Persian tale of "Rustem."—Translator.

"Stop that, I tell you ... or look out for yourself!"

"You're my darling little Grísha!"

"Well, what's the matter with you, anyhow?"

When her caresses had tamed him a little, he asked her anxiously:

"But you're not afraid?"

"Why, we shall be together," she replied simply.

It pleased him to hear this. He said to her:

"You brave little creature!"

And, at the same time, he pinched her side so hard that she shrieked.

*

The first day of the Orlóffs' service in the hospital coincided with a very great influx of patients, and the two novices, accustomed, as they were, to their slowly-moving existence, felt worried and hampered in the midst of this seething activity which had seized them in its grasp.[Pg 46] Awkward, unable to comprehend orders, overwhelmed by impressions, they immediately lost their heads, and although they incessantly ran hither and thither, in the effort to work, they hindered others rather than accomplished anything themselves. Several times, Grigóry felt, with all his being, that he merited a stem shout or a scolding for his incompetence, but, to his great amazement, no one shouted at him.

When one of the doctors, a tall, black-mustached man, with a hooked nose, and a huge wart over his right eyebrow, ordered Grigóry to assist one of the patients to sit down in the bath-tub, Grigóry gripped the sick man under the arms with so much zeal that the man groaned and frowned.

"Don't break him to pieces, my dear fellow, he'll fit into the bath-tub whole...." said the doctor seriously.

Orlóff was abashed; but the sick man, a long, gaunt fellow, laughed with all his might, and said hoarsely: "He's new to it.... He doesn't know how."

Another doctor, an old man, with a pointed gray beard, and large, brilliant eyes, gave the Orlóffs instructions, when they reached the barracks, how to treat the patients, what to do in this case and that, how to handle the sick people in transferring them. In conclusion, he asked them whether they had been to the bath the day before, and gave them white aprons. This doctor's voice was soft, he spoke rapidly; he took a great liking to the married pair, but half an hour later they had forgotten all his instructions, overwhelmed with the stormy life of the barracks. All about them flitted people in white, orders were issued, caught on the fly by the orderlies, the sick people rattled in their throats, moaned and groaned, water flowed and splashed; and all these sounds floated on the air, which was[Pg 47] so thickly saturated with penetrating odors that tickled the nostrils disagreeably, that it seemed as though every word of the doctors, every sigh of the patients, stunk also, and irritated the nose....

At first, it seemed to Orlóff that utterly restless chaos reigned there, wherein he could not possibly find his place, and that he would choke, grow deaf, fall ill.... But a few hours passed, and Grigóry, invaded by the breath of energy everywhere disseminated, pricked up his ears, and became permeated with a mighty desire to adjust himself to his business as speedily as possible, conscious that he would feel calmer and easier if he could turn in company with the rest.

"Corrosive sublimate!" shouted one doctor.

"More hot water in this bath-tub!" commanded a scraggy little medical student, with red, inflamed eyelids.

"Here you ... what's your name? Orlóff ... yes! rub his feet.... There, that's the way ... you understand.... So-o, so-o.... More lightly—you'll take the skin off.... O?, how tired I am...."

Another long-haired and pock-marked student gave Grigóry orders and showed him how to work.

"They've brought another patient!" the news passed from one to another.

"Orlóff, go and carry him in."

Grigóry displayed great zeal—all covered with perspiration, dizzy, with dimmed eves and a heavy darkness in his head. At times, the feeling of personal existence in him completely vanished under the pressure of the mass of impressions which he underwent every moment. The green spots under the clouded eyes on earth-colored faces, bones which seemed to have been sharpened by the disease,[Pg 48] the sticky, malodorous skin, the strange convulsions of the hardly living bodies—all this made his heart contract with grief, and caused a nausea which he could, with difficulty, control.

Several times, in the corridor of the barracks, he caught a fleeting glimpse of his wife; she had grown thin, and her face was gray and abstracted. He even managed to ask her, with a voice which had grown hoarse:

"Well, how goes it?"

She smiled faintly in reply, and silently disappeared.

A totally unaccustomed thought stung Grigóry: perhaps he had done wrong in forcing his wife to come hither, to such filthy work. She would fall ill of the infection.... And the next time he met her, he shouted at her severely:

"See to it that you wash your hands often ... take care!"

"And what if I don't?"—she asked, teasingly, displaying her small, white teeth.

This enraged him. A pretty place she had chosen for mirth, the fool! And how mean they were, those women! But he did not succeed in saying anything to her; catching his angry glance, Matréna went rapidly away to the women's section.

And a minute later he was carrying his acquaintance the policeman to the dead-house. The policeman rocked gently to and fro on the stretcher, with his eyes fixed in a stare, from beneath contorted brows, on the clear, hot sky. Grigóry gazed at him with dull terror in his heart: The day before yesterday he had seen that policeman at his post, and had even sworn at him as he went past—they had some little accounts to settle between them. And now, here was this man, so healthy and malicious, lying dead, all disfigured, drawn up with convulsions.

[Pg 49]

Orlóff felt that this was not right,—why should a man be born into the world at all, if he must die, in one day, of such a dirty disease? He gazed down upon the policeman from above, and pitied him. What would become of his children ... three in all? The dead man had buried his wife a year ago, and had not yet succeeded in marrying for the second time.

He even ached, somewhere inside, with this pity. But, all at once, the clenched left hand of the corpse slowly moved and straightened itself out. At the same moment, the left side of the distorted mouth, which had been half open up to now, closed.

"Halt!"—shouted Orlóff hoarsely, setting the stretcher down on the ground.—"Be quick!"—he said in a whisper to the orderly who was carrying the corpse with him. The latter turned round, cast a glance at the dead man, and said angrily to Orlóff:

"What are you lying for? Don't you understand that he's only putting himself in order for the coffin? You see how it has twisted him up? He can't be put into the coffin like that. Hey there, carry him along!"

"Yes, but he is moving...." protested Orlóff.

"Carry him along, do you hear, you queer man! Don't you understand words? I tell you: he's putting himself in order,—well, that means that he's moving. This ignorance of yours may lead you into sin, if you don't look out.... Look lively there! Can a man make such speeches about a dead body? That signifies a riot, brother ... that's what it is! Understand? In other words, hold your tongue, and don't utter a syllable to anyone about his moving,—they're all like that. Otherwise, the sow will tell it to the boar-pig, and the boar will tell it to the whole town, well, and the result will be a riot—[Pg 50]'they're burying people alive!' The populace will come here, and tear us in bits. There'll be about enough of you left for a breakfast-roll.[12] Understand? Shunt him here, on the left."

[12] A kalátch—a delicious and favorite form of bread, particularly good in Moscow.—Translator.

Prónin's calm voice and leisurely gait had a sobering effect upon Grigóry.

"Only don't let your spirits sink, my good fellow-you'll get used to it. We're well off here. Victuals, treatment and all the rest—everything is just as it should be. We shall all be corpses, my boy; it's the commonest thing in life. And, in the meanwhile, brisk up, you know, and only don't get scared—that's the chief thing! Do you drink vódka?"

"Yes," replied Orlóff.

"Well then. Yonder in the ditch I have a little bottle, in case of need. Come and let's swallow a little of it." They went to the pit, round the corner of the barracks, took a drink, and Prónin, pouring some drops of mint on sugar, gave it to Orlóff, with the words:

"Eat that, otherwise you'll smell of vódka. They're strict here about vódka. For it's injurious to drink it, they say."

"And have you got used to things here?" Grigóry asked him.

"I should think so! I've been here from the start. A lot of folks have died here since I've been here—hundreds, to speak plainly. It's an uneasy life, but a good life here, to tell the truth. It's a pious work. Like the ambulance-corps in time of war ... you've heard about the ambulance-corps and the sisters of mercy? I watched them during the Turkish campaign. I was at[Pg 51] Adragan and Kars. Well, my boy, they're purer than we are, we soldiers and people in general. We fight, we have guns, bullets, bayonets; but they—they walk about without any weapons, as though they were in a green garden. They pick up our men, or a Turk, and carry them to the field-hospital. And around them ... zh-zhee! ti-in! fi-it! Sometimes the poor ambulance man gets it in the neck—tchik!... and that's the end of him!..."

After this conversation, and a good swallow of vódka, Orlóff plucked up a little courage.

"You've put your hand to the rope, don't say it's too thick,"—he exhorted himself, as he rubbed a sick man's legs. Someone behind him entreated piteously, in a moaning voice:

"A dri-ink! O?, my dear fellow!"

And someone gabbled:

"Oho-ho-ho! Hotter! Mis-mister doctor, it relieves me! Christ reward you,—I can feel! Permit him to pour in some more boiling water!"

"Give him some wine!" shouted Doctor Váshtchenko.

Orlóff worked away, lending an attentive ear to what went on around him, and found that, as a matter of fact, everything was not so nasty and strange as it had seemed to him a little while before, and that chaos did not reign, but a great and intelligent power was acting regularly. But he shuddered, nevertheless, when he recalled the policeman, and cast a furtive glance through the window of the barracks into the yard. He believed that the policeman was dead, but still there was an element of wavering in this belief. Wouldn't the man suddenly spring up and shout? And he remembered that he seemed to have heard someone tell: that one day, somewhere or other, people who had died of the cholera leaped out of their coffins and ran away.

[Pg 52]

As Orlóff ran to and fro in the barracks, now rubbing one patient, now placing another in the bath-tub, he felt exactly as though gruel were boiling in his brain. He recalled his wife: how was she getting on yonder? Sometimes with this recollection mingled a transitory desire to steal a minute to have a look at Matréna. But after this, Orlóff felt, somehow, disconcerted at his desire, and exclaimed to himself:

"Come, bustle about, you fatmeated woman! You'll dry up, never fear.... You'll get rid of your intentions...."

He had always suspected that his wife cherished, in her heart of hearts, intentions very insulting to him as a husband, and now and then, when he rose in his suspicions to a sort of objectiveness, he even admitted that there was some foundation for these intentions. Her life, also, was tinged with yellow, and all sorts of trash creeps into one's head with such a life. This objectiveness was generally converted into certainty during the period of his suspicions. Then he would ask himself: why had he found it necessary to crawl out of his cellar into this boiling cauldron?—and he wondered at himself. But all these thoughts worked round and round, somewhere deep within him, and were fenced off, as it were, from the direct line of his work by the strained attention which he devoted to the actions of the medical staff. Never, in any sort of labor, had he beheld men wear themselves out, as the men did here, and he reflected, more than once, as he surveyed the exhausted faces of the doctors and students, that all these men really did not get paid for doing nothing!

When relieved from duty, hardly able to stand on his feet, Orlóff went out into the court-yard of the barracks, and lay down against its wall, under the window of the[Pg 53] apothecary's shop. There was a ringing in his head, there was a pain under his shoulder-blades, and his legs ached with the gnawing pangs of fatigue. He no longer thought of anything, or wanted anything, he simply stretched himself out on the sod, stared at the sky, in which hung magnificent clouds, richly adorned with the rays of sunset, and fell into a sleep like death.

He dreamed that he and his wife were the guests of Doctor Váshtchenko in a huge room, with rows of Vienna chairs ranged around the walls. On the chairs all the patients from the barracks were sitting. The doctor and Matréna were executing the "Russian Dance" in the middle of the hall, while he himself was playing the accordeon and laughing heartily, because the doctor's long legs would not bend at all, and the doctor, a very grave and pompous man, was stalking about the hall after Matréna exactly as a heron stalks over a marsh.

All at once the policeman made his appearance in the doorway.

"Aha!" he exclaimed saturninely and menacingly.—"Did you think, Gríshka, that I was completely dead? You're playing the accordeon, but you dragged me out to the dead-house! Come along with me, now! Get up!" Seized with a fit of trembling, all bathed in perspiration, Orlóff raised himself quickly and sat on the ground. Opposite, was squatting Doctor Váshtchenko, who said to him reproachfully:

"What sort of an ambulance nurse are you, my friend, if you go to sleep on the ground, and lie down on it upon your belly, to boot, hey? Now, you'll take cold in your bowels,—you'll take to your cot, and the first you know, you'll die.... It's not right, my friend,—you have a place in the barracks to sleep. Why didn't they tell you[Pg 54] so? Besides, you are in a perspiration, and have a chill. Come along with me, now, I'll give you something."

"I was so tired,..." muttered Orlóff.

"So much the worse. You must take care of your-self—it is a dangerous time, and you are a valuable man."

Orlóff followed the doctor in silence along the corridor of the barracks, in silence drank some sort of medicine out of a wine-glass, drank something more out of another, frowned and spat.

"Come, go and have a sleep now.... Farewell for a while!" and the doctor began to move his long, slender feet over the floor of the corridor.

Orlóff looked after him, and suddenly ran after him, with a broad smile.

"I thank you humbly, doctor."

"What for?" and the doctor halted.

"For the work. Now I shall try with all my might to please you! Because your anxiety is agreeable to me ... and ... you said I was a valuable man ... and, altogether, I'm most si-sincerely grateful to you!" The doctor gazed intently and in surprise at the agitated face of his hospital orderly, and smiled also.

"You're a queer fellow! However, never mind,—you'll turn out splendidly ... genuine. Go ahead, and do your best; it will not be for me, but for the patients. We must wrest a man from the disease, tear him out of its paws,—do you understand me? Well, then, go ahead and try your best to conquer the disease. And, in the mean-while—go and sleep!"

Orlóff was soon lying on his cot, and fell asleep with a pleasing sensation of warmth in his bowels. He felt joyful, and was proud of his very simple conversation with the doctor.

[Pg 55]

But he sank into slumber regretting that his wife had not heard that conversation. He must tell her to-morrow.... That devil's pepper-pot would not believe it, in all probability.

*

"Come and drink your tea, Grísha," his wife woke him in the morning.

He raised his head, and looked at her. She smiled at him. She was so calm and fresh, with her hair smoothly brushed, and clad in her white slip.

It pleased him to see her thus, and, at the same time, he reflected that the other men in the barracks certainly must see her in the same light.

"What do you mean—what tea? I have my own tea;—where am I to go?" he asked gloomily.

"Come and drink it with me,"—she proposed, gazing at him with caressing eyes.

Grigóry turned his eyes aside and said, curtly, that he would go.

She went away, but he lay down on his cot again, and began to think.

"What a woman! She invites me to drink tea, she's affectionate.... But she has grown thin in one day." He felt sorry for her, and wanted to do something which would please her. Should he buy something sweet to eat with the tea? But while he was washing himself he rejected that idea,—why pamper the woman? Let her live as she is!

They drank tea in a bright little den with two windows, which looked out on the plain, all flooded with the golden radiance of the morning sun. On the grass, under the windows, the dew was still glistening, far away on the horizon in the nebulous rose-colored morning mist stood[Pg 56] the trees along the highway. The sky was clear, and the fragrance of damp grass and earth floated in through the windows from the meadows.

The table stood against the wall between the windows, and at it sat three persons: Grigóry and Matréna with the latter's companion,—a tall, thin, elderly woman, with a pock-marked face, and kindly gray eyes. They called her Felitzáta Egórovna; she was unmarried, the daughter of a Collegiate Assessor, and could not drink tea made with water from the hospital boiler, but always boiled her own samovár. As she explained all this to Orlóff, in a cracked voice, she hospitably suggested that he should sit by the window, and drink his fill of "the really heavenly air," and then she disappeared somewhere.

"Well, did you get tired yesterday?" Orlóff asked his wife.

"Just frightfully tired!" replied Matréna with animation.—"I could hardly stand on my feet, my head reeled, I couldn't understand what was said to me, and the first I knew, I was lying at full length on the floor, unconscious. I barely—barely held out until relief-time came.... I kept praying; 'help, oh Lord,' I thought."

"And are you scared?"

"Of the sick people?"

"The sick people are nothing."

"I'm afraid of the dead people. Do you know...." she bent over to her husband, and whispered to him in affright:—"they move after they are dead.... God is my witness, they do!"

"I've se-een that!"—laughed Grigóry sceptically.—"Yesterday, Nazároff the policeman came near giving me a box on the ear after his death. I was carrying him to the dead-house, and he gave su-uch a flourish with his[Pg 57] left hand ... I hardly managed to get out of the way ... so there now!"—He was not telling the strict truth, but it seemed to come out that way of itself, against his will.

He was greatly pleased at this tea-drinking in the bright, clean room, with windows opening on a boundless expanse of green plain and blue sky. And something else pleased him, also,—not exactly his wife, nor yet himself. The result of it all was that he wished to show his best side, to be the hero of the day which was just beginning.

"When I start in to work—even the sky will become hot, so it will! For there is a cause for my doing so. In the first place, there are the people here,—there aren't any more like them on earth, I can tell you that!"

He narrated his conversation with the doctor, and as he again exerted his fancy, unconsciously to himself—this fact still further strengthened his mood.

"In the second place, there's the work itself. It's a great affair, my friend, in the nature of war, for example. The cholera and people—which is to get the better of the other? Brains are needed, and everything must be just so. What's cholera? One must understand that, and then—go ahead and give it what it can't endure! Doctor Váshtchenko says to me: 'you're a valuable man in this matter, Orlóff,' says he. 'Don't get scared,' says he; 'and drive it up from the patient's legs into his belly, and there,' says he, 'I'll nip it with something sour. That's the end of it, and the man lives, and ought to be eternally grateful to you and me, because who was it that took him away from death? We!'"—And Orlóff proudly inflated his chest as he gazed at his wife with kindling eyes.

She smiled pensively into his face; he was handsome, and bore a great resemblance to his old self, the Grísha[Pg 58] whom she had seen some time, long ago, before their marriage.

"All of them in our division are just such hard-working, kind folks. The woman doctor, a fa-at woman with spectacles, and then the female medical students. They're nice people, they talk to a body so simply, and you can understand everything they say."

"So that signifies that you're all right, satisfied?"—asked Grigóry, whose excitement had somewhat cooled off.

"Do you mean me? Oh Lord! Judge for yourself: I get twelve rubles, and you get twenty ... that makes thirty-eight a month![13] We're lodged and fed! That means, that if people keep on getting sick until the winter, how much shall we amass?... And then, God willing, we'll raise ourselves out of that cellar...."

[13] A little less than half that amount in dollars.—Translator.

"We-ell now, that's a serious subject...." said Orlóff thoughtfully and, after a pause, he exclaimed with the pathos of hope, as he slapped his wife on the shoulder:—"Ekh, Matrénka,[14] isn't the sun shining on us? Don't get scared now!"

[14] Another diminutive of Matréna.—Translator.

She flushed all over.

"If you'd only stop drinking...."

"As to that—hold your tongue! Suit your awl to your leather, your phiz to your life.... With a different life, my conduct will be different."

"Oh Lord, if that might only happen!"—sighed his wife profoundly.

"Well now, hush up!"

"Grishenka!"[15]

[15] A third variation (Grísha, Gríshka), of Grigóry, in the diminutive. '—Translator.

[Pg 59]

They parted with certain novel feelings toward each other, inspired by hope, ready to work until their strength gave out, alert and cheerful.

Two or three days passed, and Orlóff had already won several flattering mentions as a sagacious, smart young fellow, and along with this he observed that Prónin and the other orderlies in the barracks bore themselves toward him with envy, and a desire to make things unpleasant for him. He was on his guard, and he also imbibed wrath against fat-faced Prónin, with whom he had been inclined to strike up a friendship and to chat, "according to his soul." At the same time, he was embittered by the plain desire of his fellow-workers to do him some injury.—"Ekh, the rascals!" he exclaimed to himself, and quietly gritted his teeth, endeavoring not to let slip some convenient opportunity to pay his friends off "with as good as they gave." And, involuntarily, his thought halted at his wife:—with her he could talk about everything, she would not be envious of his successes, and would not burn his boots with carbolic acid, as Prónin had done.

All the working-days were as stormy and seething with activity as the first had been, but Grigóry no longer became so fatigued, for he expended his strength with more discernment with every day that passed. He learned to distinguish the smell of the medicaments, and, picking out from among them the odor of sulphate of ether, he inhaled it with delight on the sly, when opportunity offered, finding that the inhalation of ether had almost as agreeable an action as a good glass of vódka. Catching the meaning of the medical staff at half a word, always amiable and talkative, understanding how to entertain the patients, he became more and more of a favorite with the doctors and the medical students, and thus, under the[Pg 60] combined influence of all the impressions of his new mode of existence, a strange, exalted mood was formed within him. He felt himself to be a man of special qualities. In him beat the desire to do something which should attract to him the attention of everyone, should astonish everyone, and force them to the conviction that he had a right to the ambition which had elevated him to such a pitch in his own eyes. This was the singular ambition of the man who had suddenly realized that he was a man, and who, as it were, still not quite firmly assured of the fact, wished to confirm it, in some way, to himself and to others; this was ambition, gradually transformed into a thirst for some disinterested exploit.

As the result of this incentive, Orlóff performed various risky feats, such as straining himself by carrying a heavily-built patient from his cot to the bath-tub single-handed, without waiting for assistance from his fellow-orderlies, nursing the very dirtiest of the patients, behaving in a daring sort of way in regard to the possibility of contagion, and handling the dead with a simplicity which sometimes passed over into cynicism. But all this did not satisfy him; he longed for something on a greater scale, and this longing burned incessantly within him, tortured him, and, at last, drove him to anguish.

Then he poured out his soul to his wife, because he had no one else.

One evening, when he and his wife were relieved from duty, they went out into the fields, after they had drunk tea. The barracks stood far away from the town, in the middle of a long, green plain, bounded on one side by a dark strip of forest, on the other by the line of buildings in the town; on the north the plain extended into the far distance, and there its verdure became merged with the[Pg 61] dull-blue horizon; on the south it was intersected by a precipitous descent to the river, and along the verge of this precipice ran the highway, along which, at equal distances one from another, stood aged, wide-spreading trees. The sun was setting, and the crosses on the churches of the town, rising above the dark-green of the gardens, flamed in the sky, reflecting sheaves of golden rays, and on the window-panes of the houses which lay on the edge of the town the red glow of the sunset was reflected also. A band of music was playing somewhere or other; from the ravine, thickly overgrown with a fir-grove, a resinous fragrance was wafted aloft; the forest, also, shed abroad on the air its complicated, succulent perfume; light, fragrant waves of warm wind floated caressingly toward the town, and in the wide, deserted plain everything was very delightful, quiet and sweetly-melancholy.

The Orlóffs walked across the grass in silence, with pleasure inhaling the pure air in place of the hospital odors.

"Where's that band playing, in the town, or in the camp?" inquired Matréna softly, of her pensive husband.

She did not like to see him thoughtful—he seemed a stranger to her, and far away from her at such moments. Of late, they had chanced to be together so very little, and she prized these moments all the more.

"The band?"—Grigóry replied with another question, as though freeing himself from a dream.—"Well, the devil take that band! You just ought to hear the music in my soul ... that's something like!"

"What is it?" she asked tremulously, looking into his eyes.

"I don't know.... That is, I can't tell you ... and even if I could would you be able to understand? My[Pg 62] soul burns.... It pines for space ... so that I might develop myself to my full strength.... Ekhma! I feel within myself invincible strength! That is to say, if this cholera, for instance, could be transformed into a man ... into an epic hero ... even Ilyá of Muróm himself;[16]—I'd grapple with it; 'Come on, I'll fight thee to the death! Thou art a power, and I, Gríshka Orlóff, am a power also,—now, let's see who'll get the best of the other?' And I'd strangle it, even if it killed me too.... There'd be a cross over me in the field, with the inscription: 'Grigóry Andréeff Orlóff.... He freed Russia from the cholera.' Nothing more would be necessary."

[16] For Ilyá of Muróm and the other famous epic heroes (bogatyry) see: "The Epic Songs of Russia," by Isabel F. Hapgood. Charles Scribner's Sons.

As he spoke, his face burned, and his eyes flashed.

"You're my strong man!" whispered Matréna, nestling close to his side.

"Do you understand ... I'd hurl myself on a hundred knives, if only it would be of any use! If life could be lightened in that way. Because I see people: Doctor Váshtchenko, student Khokhryakóff,—it's wonderful how they work! They ought to have died long ago of fatigue.... Do you think they do it for money? A man can't work like that for money! The doctors, thank the Lord! have something of their own, and get a little in addition.... Why, an old man fell ill lately, and so Doctor Váshtchenko hammered away at him for four days, and never went home once the whole time.... Money doesn't count in such a case; pity is the cause. He's sorry for people—well, and so he doesn't spare himself ... for whose sake, you ask? For[Pg 63] everybody's sake ... for the sake of Míshka úsoff,... Míshka's proper place is in jail, for everybody knows that Míshka is a thief, and, perhaps, even worse.... They're curing Míshka.... And they were glad when he got up from his cot, they laughed.... So I want to feel that same joy, also ... and to have a great deal of it.... I'd like to choke with it! Because it gives me the heart-ache to see how they laugh over their work. I ache all over, and catch fire. I will do something!... But how? Oh ... the devil!"

Orlóff waved his hand hopelessly, and again fell into thought.

Matréna said nothing, but her heart beat anxiously—this excitement of her husband alarmed her, and in his words she plainly felt the great passion of his longing, which she did not understand, because she did not try to understand it. It was her husband, not a hero, who was dear and necessary to her.

They reached the verge of the precipice, and sat down, side by side.... The tufted crests of the young birch-trees looked down upon them, and in the bottom of the ravine there already lay a bluish mist, which sent forth an odor of dampness, rotting leaves and pine-needles. From time to time a puff of wind swept along the ravine, the branches of the birch-trees, the little fir-trees, rocked, rocked to and fro,—the whole ravine became filled with anxious, timorous whispering, and it seemed as though someone who was tenderly beloved and guarded by the trees had fallen asleep in the ravine, beneath their canopy, and they were whispering together about him very, very softly, in order not to awaken him. And in the town, lights shone forth, and stood out like reddish flowers against the dark background of its gardens. And in the[Pg 64] sky the stars began to kindle their fires. The Orlóffs sat on in silence,—he thoughtfully drummed on his knee with his fingers, she gazed at him and sighed softly.

And suddenly clasping her arms about his neck, she laid her head on his breast, and said in a whisper:

"My darling Gríshka! My dear one! How good you have become to me once more, my brave man! You see, it seems as though it were the good time ... after our wedding,... you and I were living along ... you never utter an unkind word to me, you are always talking with me, you open your soul to me ... you don't bawl at me."

"And have you been fretting over that? I'll give you a thrashing, if you want it,"—jested Grigóry affectionately, feeling in his soul an influx of tenderness and pity for his wife.

He began softly to stroke her head with his hand, and this caress pleased him,—it was so paternal—the caress of a father for a grown-up child. Matréna did in fact resemble a child: she now climbed up on his knees, and seated herself in his lap, in a soft, warm little ball.

"My dear one!"—she whispered.

He heaved a profound sigh, and words which were new both to his wife and to himself flowed of themselves from his tongue.

"Eh, you poor little kitten! You're affectionate ... you see, anyway, and there is no friend nearer than a husband. But you have kept waiting your chance on one side.... You know, if I did hurt you sometimes, it was because I was sad, Mótrya. We lived in a pit.... We did not see the light, we hardly knew people at all. I've got out of the pit, and have recovered my sight. I was like a blind man as regards life. And[Pg 65] now I understand that a wife, anyhow, is a man's closest friend in life. Because people are snakes and reptiles, to tell the truth.... They're always trying to deal wounds to other people.... For instance—Prónin, Vasiukóff.... Well, they may go to the.... Hold your peace, Mótrya! We shall get straightened out, all right, never fear.... We shall make our way, and live with understanding.... Well? What do you think of it, my little goose?"

She shed sweet tears of happiness, and replied to his question with kisses.

"You are my only one!" he whispered, and kissed her in return.

They wiped away each other's tears with kisses, and both were conscious of their briny taste. And for a long time Orlóff continued to talk in words which were new for him.

It was completely dark now. The sky, magnificently adorned with countless swarms of stars, looked down upon the earth with triumphant sadness, and in the plain reigned silence like that of the sky.

*

They had got into the habit of drinking tea together. On the morning after their talk in the fields, Orlóff presented himself in his wife's room confused and surly over something. Felitzáta was not feeling well, Matréna was alone in the room, and greeted her husband with a beaming face, which immediately clouded over, and she asked him anxiously:

"What makes you like that? Are you ill?"

"No, never mind,"—he replied curtly, as he seated himself on a chair, and drew toward him the tea which she had already poured out.

"But what is it?" persisted Matréna.

[Pg 66]

"I didn't sleep. I kept thinking.... You and I cackled together pretty hard last night, and got silly-soft ... and now I'm ashamed of myself.... There's no use in that. You women always try to get a man into your hands, on such occasions ... so you do.... Only, don't you dream of such a thing—you won't succeed..... You can't get around me, and I won't yield to you.... So now you know it!"

He said all this very impressively, but did not look at his wife. Matréna never took her eyes from his face all the time, and her lips writhed strangely.

"Are you sorry that you came so near to me last night—is that it?"—she asked quietly.—"Are you sorry that you kissed and caressed me? What does this mean? It insults me to hear it ... it is very bitter, you're breaking my heart with such speeches. What do you want? Do you find me tiresome, am not I dear to you, or what?"

She gazed at him suspiciously, but in her tone resounded pain and a challenge to her husband.

"N—no...." said Grigóry abashed, "I was only talking in general ... You and I used to live in a hole, you know yourself what sort of a life it was! It makes me sick even to think of it. And now that we've got out of it—I feel afraid of something. Everything changed so suddenly.... I'm like a stranger to myself, and you seem to be a different person too. What is the meaning of this! And what will come next?"

"What God sends, Grísha!"—said Matréna gravely.—"Only don't feel sorry that you were kind last night."

"All right, drop it...." Grigóry stopped her as abashed as ever, and still sighing.—"You see, I'm thinking that we shan't come to anything, after all. And our former life was not flowery, and my present life is not to my[Pg 67] taste. And although I don't drink, don't beat you, and don't swear...."

Matréna laughed convulsively.

"You have no time to worry about that now."

"I could always find time to get drunk,"—smiled Orlóff. "I don't feel tempted to—: that's the wonder. And besides, in general, I feel ... not exactly ashamed of it, and yet not exactly afraid of it.. he shook his head, and began to meditate.

"The Lord only knows what is the matter with you," said Matréna, with a heavy sigh.—"It's a pleasant life, though there's a lot of work; all the doctors are fond of you, and you are behaving well ... really, I don't know what to make of it. You're very uneasy."

"That's true, I'm uneasy.... Now, I was thinking in the night: Piótr Ivánovitch says: all men are equals, and ain't I a man like the rest? Yet Doctor Véshtchenko is better than I am, and Piótr Ivánovitch is better, and so are many others.... That means, that they are not my equals ... and I'm not on a level with them, I feel that.... They cured Míshka úsoff, and rejoiced at it.... And I don't understand that. On the whole, why feel glad that a man has recovered? His life was worse than the cholera convulsions, if you speak the truth. They understand that, but they are glad.... And I would have liked to rejoice too, like them, only I can't.... Because—as I said before ... what is there to be glad about?"

"But they pity the people,"—returned Matréna,—"okh, how they pity them! It's the same thing in our section ... a sick woman begins to mend, and, oh, Lord, what goings on! And when a poor woman gets her discharge, they give her advice, and money and medicines.[Pg 68]... It even makes me shed tears ... the kind people, the compassionate people!"

"Now you say—tears.... But I'm seized with amazement ... Nothing less...." Orlóff shrugged his shoulders, and rubbed his head, and stared in wonder at his wife.

Eloquence made its appearance in her, from somewhere, and she began zealously to demonstrate to her husband, that people are entirely worthy of compassion. Bending toward him, and gazing into his face with affectionate eyes, she talked long to him about people, and the burden of life, and he stared at her and thought:

"Eh, how she talks! Where does she get the words?"

"For you are compassionate yourself—you say, you would strangle the cholera, if you had the power. But what for? Whom does it annoy? People, not you: you have even begun to live better because it made its appearance."

Orlóff suddenly burst out laughing.

"Why, that's so, certainly!—I am better off, that's true, isn't it? Akh, you shrewd creature,—make the most of it! People die, and I live better in consequence, hey?—That's what life is like! Pshaw!"

He rose, and went away, laughing, to his duty. As he was walking along the corridor, he suddenly felt regret that no one except himself had heard Matréna's speech. "She spoke cleverly! A woman, a woman, and yet she understands something, too." And absorbed in an agreeable sort of sensation, he entered his ward, greeted by the hoarse rattling and the moans of the sick men.

With every passing day, the world of his feelings grew wider and wider, and, along with this, his necessity for speech waxed greater. He could not, of course, narrate as[Pg 69] a whole what was taking place within him, for the greater part of his sensations and thought were beyond his grasp. An angry envy blazed up within him, because he could not rejoice over people.

It was after this that the desire was kindled within him to perform some wonderful deed, and astonish everyone thereby. He felt conscious that his position in the barracks placed him between people, as it were: the doctors and students were higher than he, the servitors were lower,—what was he himself? And a sense of loneliness laid its grasp upon him; then it seemed to him that Fate was playing with him, had blown him out of his place, and was now carrying him through the air like a feather. He began to feel sorry for himself, and went to his wife. Sometimes he did not wish to do this, considering that frankness toward her would lower him in her eyes, but he went, nevertheless. He arrived gloomy, and now in a vicious, again in a sceptical mood, he went away, almost always, petted and composed. His wife had words of her own; they were not many, they were simple, but there was always a great deal of feeling in them, and he observed, with astonishment, that Matréna was coming to occupy a larger and larger place in his life, that he had to think of her and talk with her "according to the soul," more and more frequently.

She in her turn understood this very well, indeed, and endeavored, in every way, to broaden her growing significance in his life. Her toilsome and energetic life in the barracks had increased her sense of her own value greatly,—it came to pass unnoticed by Matréna. She did not think, she did not reason, but when she recalled her former life, in the cellar, in the narrow circle of cares for her husband and her housekeeping, she involuntarily compared the past with the present, and the gloomy picture of the cellar-existence[Pg 70] gradually retreated further and further from her. The authorities at the barracks liked her; because of her intelligence, and knowledge of how to work, they all treated her graciously, they all saw in her an individual; and this was new for her, it gave her animation.

One day when she was on night-duty, the fat woman-doctor began to question her about her life, and Matréna, as she was willingly and frankly telling her about her life, suddenly paused and smiled.

"What are you laughing at?" asked the doctor.

"Why nothing.... I lived very badly ... and, you see, if you will believe it, my dear madam,—I did not understand it ... up to this very moment, I never understood how badly."

After this glance into the past, a strange feeling took form in Mrs. Orlóff's breast toward her husband, she loved him exactly as much as before—with the blind love of the female, but it began to seem to her as though Grigóry were her debtor. At times, when she was talking with him, she assumed a patronizing tone, for he often inspired her with pity by his uneasy speeches. But, nevertheless, she was sometimes seized with doubt as to the possibility of a quiet and peaceful life with her husband, although, on the whole, she still believed that Grigóry would become steady, and that this melancholy would be extinguished in him.

They were fatally bound to grow nearer to each other, and—both were young, fit for work, strong—they might have gone on and lived out their days in the gray life of half-fed poverty, a life of exploiting others, to the end completely absorbed in the pursuit of the kopék, but they had been saved from this end by what Gríshka called his "uneasiness in the heart," and was, in its essence, unable to reconcile itself with every-day things.

[Pg 71]

On the morning of a gloomy September day a wagon drove into the court-yard of the barracks, and Prónin took out of it a little boy, all streaked with paints, bony, yellow, hardly breathing.

"From the Petúnnikoff house, in Damp street, again," the driver reported, in answer to the query, whence the patient came.

"Tchízhik!" exclaimed Orlóff, in distress,—"akh, oh, Lord! Sénka! Tchizh![16] Do you know me?"

[16] Tchizh means—a canary-bird. Tchízhik—a little canary-bird.—Translator.

"Y—yes, I know you...." said Tchízhik, with an effort, as he lay on the stretcher, and slowly rolled his eyes up under his brow, in order to see Orlóff, who was walking at his head, and bending over him.

"Akh ... what a merry bird you were! How did you come to give up?"—asked Orlóff. He was, somehow, strangely alarmed at the sight of that dirty little boy, in the throes of the disease.—"Why did it seize on this poor little boy?" he embodied in one question all his sensations, and sadly shook his head.

Tchízhik made no reply, and shrugged his shoulders.

"I'm cold," said he, when they laid him on a cot, and began to remove his rags, streaked all over with every sort of paint-color.

"Now, we're going to put you into hot water immediately ..." promised Orlóff.—"And we'll cure you."

Tchízhik shook his little head, and whispered:

"You can't cure me.... Uncle Grigóry ... bend down your ... ear. I stole the accordeon.... It's in the wood-shed ... Day before yesterday I touched it, for the first time since I stole it. Akh, what an accordeon it is! I hid it ... and then my[Pg 72] belly began to ache.... So.... That means, that this is for my sin.... It's hanging on the wall, under the stairs ... and I piled wood up over it.... So.... Uncle Grigóry ... give it.... The accordeon-player had a sister.... She asked about it.... Gi-ive it ... to ... her!..." He began to groan, and to writhe in convulsions.

They did everything they could for him, but the gaunt, exhausted little body would not retain life in it, and in the evening, Orlóff carried him on the stretcher to the dead-house. As he carried him, he felt exactly as though he had been wronged.

In the dead-house, Orlóff tried to straighten out Tchízhik's body, but he did not succeed. Orlóff went away overwhelmed, mournful, bearing with him the image of the merry lad distorted with the disease.

He was seized with a debilitating consciousness of his powerlessness in the face of death, and his ignorance of it. Despite all the pains he had taken over Tchízhik, despite the zealous labors of the doctors,... the boy had died! This was outrageous.... It would seize upon him, Orlóff, one of these days, and twist him up in convulsions.... And that would be the end of him. He grew frightened, and, along with this feeling, he was invaded by a sense of loneliness. He wanted to discuss all this with some clever man. More than once, he tried to strike up a comprehensive conversation with one or another of the students, but no one had any time for philosophy, and Grigóry's attempts were not crowned with success. He was obliged to go to his wife, and talk with her. So he went to her, morose and sad.

She had only just come off duty, and was washing herself[Pg 73] self in the corner of the room, but the samovár was already standing on the table, filling the air with steam and hissing.

Grigóry seated himself, in silence, at the table, and began to gaze at his wife's bare, plump shoulders. The samovár bubbled away, splashing water over; Matréna snorted; orderlies ran swiftly back and forth along the corridor, and Grigóry tried to determine, from the walk, who was passing.

All of a sudden, it seemed to him, as though Matréna's shoulders were as cold, and covered with the same sort of sticky sweat as Tchízhik, when the latter was writhing with convulsions on the hospital cot. He shuddered, and said, in a dull voice:

"Sénka is dead...."

"Dead? The kingdom of heaven to the child Sénka, newly-appeared before God!"[17] said Matréna prayerfully, and then she began to spit fiercely—some of the soap had got into her mouth.

[17] The Holy Orthodox Catholic Church of the East, of which Russia is now the most prominent representative, has four different burial-services: one for ecclesiastics, one for laymen, which undergoes certain changes if the burial takes place at Easter-tide (making the third), and one for children, or "infants," meaning children under eight years of age. All are very beautiful and touching. The above exclamation is the general one.—Translator.

"I'm sorry for him," sighed Grigóry.

"He was a dreadful tease."

"He's dead, and that ends it! It's no business of yours now, what sort of a fellow he was!... But it's a pity he died. He was bold and lively.... The accordeon ... Hm!... He was a clever lad.... I sometimes used to look at him and think: I'll take him as an apprentice, or something of that sort.... He was an orphan ... he would have got used to us, and[Pg 74] have taken the place of a son to us.... For, you see, we have no children.... No.... You're so healthy, yet you don't bear any children.... You had one, and that was the end of it. Ekh, you woman! If we had some squalling little brats, you'd see we shouldn't find life so tiresome.... But now it's only live on, and work.... And for what? To feed myself and you.... And of what use are we ... of what use is food to us? In order that we may work.... So it turns out to be a senseless circle.... But if we had children—that would be quite another matter.... That it would."

He said this in a sad, dissatisfied tone, with his head drooping low. Matréna stood before him and listened, gradually turning pale, as he continued:

"I'm healthy, you're healthy, and still we have no children.... What's the meaning of it? Why? Ye-es ... a man thinks and thinks about it ... and then he takes to drink!"

"You lie!" said Matréna firmly and loudly.—"You lie! Don't you dare to utter your dastardly words to me ... do you hear? Don't you dare! You drink—because you choose to, out of self-indulgence, because you have no self-control, and my childlessness has nothing whatever to do with the matter; you lie, Gríshka!"

Grigóry was stunned. He flung himself back, against the back of his chair, cast a glance at his wife, and did not recognize her. Never before had he beheld her so infuriated, never had she looked at him with such mercilessly-angry eyes, or spoken with such power in her words.

"Come now, come!"—ejaculated Grigóry defiantly, clutching the seat of his chair with his hands.—"Come now, talk some more!"

[Pg 75]

"And so I will! I wouldn't have spoken, only that reproach from you I cannot endure! I don't bear you children, don't I? And I won't! I can't any more.... I can't have any children!..." a sob was audible in her shriek.

"Don't yell," her husband warned her.

"Why don't I bear children, hey? Come now, recall to your mind, Grísha, how much have you beaten me? How many kicks in the side have you showered on me?... reckon them up, do! How you have tortured, racked me? Do you know how much blood flowed from me after your tortures? My chemise used to be bloody clear up to my neck! And that's why I bear no children, my dear husband! How can you reproach me for that, hey? How is it that your ugly phiz isn't ashamed to look me in the face? ... For you are a murderer! you have killed your children, killed them yourself! and now you reproach me because I don't bear any.... I have endured everything from you, I have forgiven you for everything,—but those words I will never forgive, to all eternity! When I am dying,—I'll call that to mind! Don't you understand that you are to blame yourself, that you have destroyed me? Ain't I like all women—don't I want children? Do you think I don't want them? Many a night, when I couldn't sleep, I have prayed to the Lord God that He would preserve the children in my body from you, you murderer! ... When I see a strange child—I choke with bitterness, out of envy and pity for myself.... I'd like! ... Queen of Heaven!... I used to pet that Sénka on the sly.... What am I? O Lord! A barren woman...."

She began to sob. The words leaped from her mouth without sense of coherence.

[Pg 76]

Her face was spotted all over, she trembled, and scratched her neck, because the sobs gurgled in her throat. Keeping a stout grasp on his chair, Grigóry, pale and crushed, sat opposite her, and with widely-opened eyes stared at this woman, who was a stranger to him, and he was afraid of her ... afraid that she would clutch him by the throat and strangle him. Precisely that was what her terrible eyes, blazing with wrath, promised him. She was twice as strong as he now, and he felt it, and turned cowardly; he could not rise and strike her, as he would have done, had he not understood that she had undergone a transformation, as though she had imbibed vast strength from some source.

"You have stung my very soul, Gríshka! Great is your sin toward me! I have endured, I have held my peace ... because ... I love you ... but your reproaches I cannot bear!... My strength is exhausted.... You heaven-sent husband of mine! For those words of yours, may you be thrice accur...."

"Hold your tongue!—" thundered Gríshka, with a snarl. "You're outrageous! Have you forgotten where we are? You accursed devil!"

There was a mist over Grigóry's eyes. He could not discern who it was that was standing in the door-way, and talking in a bass voice; he swore in vile language, thrust the man aside, and rushed out into the fields. And Matréna, after standing still in the middle of the room for a minute, reeling and as though struck with blindness, with her hands outstretched before her, went to the cot, and fell upon it, with a groan.

Darkness descended, and the golden moon, covering the fields with shadows, peered curiously into the windows of the room from the sky, from amid ragged, dark-blue clouds.

[Pg 77]

Soon a fine, drizzling rain began to beat upon the window-panes and the walls of the barracks—the forerunner of the interminable autumn rains which fill the soul with melancholy.

The pendulum of the clock ticked off the seconds with equable beat, the raindrops lashed the panes. Hour after hour passed, and the rain still descended, and on the cot, the woman lay motionless and stared, with swollen eyes, at the ceiling. Her face was gloomy, stern, her teeth were tightly clenched, her cheek-bones stood out prominently, and in her eyes gleamed both terror and sadness. And the rain still rattled against the walls and the window-panes; it seemed as though it were whispering something wearisomely-monotonous, were trying to convince someone of something, but had not sufficient passion to do it quickly, handsomely, with force, and hoped to attain its end by a torturing, interminable, colorless sermon, which lacked the sincere pathos of faith.

The rain continued and was still pouring when the sky became overcast with hues of approaching dawn, which presage an inclement day, and so resemble the color of a knife, which has been long in use, and has lost the gleam of its polish. But still Matréna could not sleep. In the monotonous murmur of the rain, she heard a question which was both anxious and alarming to her:

"What will happen now? What will happen now?"

It resounded importunately outside the windows, and an aching pain in all her being responded to it.

"What will happen now?"

The woman was afraid to answer herself, although the answer kept flashing up before her in the shape of a drunken husband, as fierce as any wild beast. But it was difficult to part with her dream of a calm, loving life; she[Pg 78] had already got accustomed to this dream, and she banished from her a menacing foreboding. And at the same time, the consciousness flashed across her, that if this did happen—if Grigóry should take to drink again, she could no longer live with him. She saw him different, she herself had become a different person, and her former life aroused in her both fear and disgust—novel sensations, hitherto unknown to her. But she was a woman, and in the end, she began to upbraid herself for this breach with her husband.

"And how did it come about?... O Lord!... It's just as though I had torn myself off a hook ..."

In such contradictory, torturing reflections, another long hour passed by. Day dawned. A heavy fog was swirling over the plain, and the sky could not be seen through its gray mist.

"Mrs. Orlóff! Time to go on duty...."

Mechanically obeying this summons, shouted through the door of her room, she slowly rose from her bed, washed herself in haste, and went to the barracks, feeling weak and half ill. In the barracks she evoked general surprise by the languor of her movements, and her gloomy face with its dull eyes.

"Mrs. Orlóff! You seem to be ill?" one of the doctors said to her.

"It's nothing...."

"But tell me, don't stand on ceremony! you know, we can get a substitute for you ..."

Matréna felt conscience-stricken, she did not wish to betray her pain and terror to this person who was kind, but still a stranger to her, nevertheless. And summoning up, from the depths of her tortured soul, the remnants of her courage, she said to the woman-doctor, with a smile:

"It's nothing! I have had a little quarrel with my husband ...[Pg 79] It will pass off ... it isn't the first time...."

"You poor thing!"—sighed the doctor, who knew about her life.

Matréna wanted to fall down before her, bury her head in the doctor's lap, and scream.... But she restrained herself, and only pressed her lips tightly together, and passed her hand over her throat, as though she were thrusting back into her breast the sobs which were on the point of bursting forth.

When she was relieved from duty, she entered her room, and the first thing she did, was to look out of the window. Across the fields, to the barracks, a waggon was moving,—they must be bringing a sick person in it. Fine rain was sifting down from the gray storm-clouds. Nothing else was to be seen. Matréna turned away from the window, and with a heavy sigh, seated herself at the table, engrossed by the thought:

"What will happen now?"—And her heart beat time to these words.

For a long time she sat there, alone, in a heavy semi-doze, and every time the sound of footsteps in the corridor made her shudder, and rising from her chair, she looked out of the door....

But when, at last, the door opened, and Grigóry entered, she did not shudder, and did not rise, for she felt as though the autumnal storm-clouds had suddenly descended upon her, from the sky, with all their weight.

Grigóry halted at the door, flung his wet cap on the floor, and stamping heavily with his feet, he approached his wife. He was streaming with water. His face was red, his eyes were dim, and his lips were stretched in a broad, stupid smile. As he walked, Matréna heard the water seeping in[Pg 80] his boots. He was pitiful, and she had not imagined him in this aspect.

"Good!"—she said softly.

Grigóry waggled his head stupidly, and asked her:

"Would you like to have me bow down to your feet?"

She made no reply.

"You wouldn't? Well, that's your affair.... But I've been thinking all the while: am I guilty toward you or not? It turns out—that I am. So now I say: do you want me to bow down to your f-feet?"

She maintained silence, inhaling the odor of vódka which emanated from him, and a bitter feeling gnawed at her soul.

"Now, see here, you—don't you make faces! Take your chance while I'm peaceable...." said Grigóry, raising his voice.—"Come, are you going to forgive me?"

"You're drunk," said Matréna, with a sigh.... Go and sleep...."

"You lie, I'm not drunk, I'm tired, I've been walking and walking and thinking.... I've done a heap of thinking, brother ... oh! You look out!"

He menaced her with his finger, laughing with a wry grimace.

"Why don't you speak?"

"I can't talk with you."

"You can't? Why not?"

All at once, he flared up, and his voice grew firmer.

"You screamed at me, you snarled at me yesterday ... well, and now I'm asking your forgiveness. Understand that!"

He said this in a very ominous way, his lips quivered, and his nostrils were inflated. Matréna knew what that meant, and the past rose up before her in vivid colors: the[Pg 81] cellar, the Saturday fights, the anguish and suffocation of their life.

"I understand!"—she said, sharply.—"I see that you are ... turning into a beast again now ... ekh, you disgusting creature!"

"I'm turning into a beast? That ... hasn't anything to do with the case.... I say ... will you forgive me? What are you thinking about? Do I need it—your forgiveness? I can get on capitally without it ... but still, here, I want you to forgive me.... Understand?"

"Go away from me, Grigóry!" ... exclaimed the woman sadly, turning away from him.

"Go away?"—laughed Grigóry maliciously.—"I'm to go away, so that you will remain at liberty? Come now, I wo-on't! Have you seen this?"

He seized her by the shoulder, dragged-her toward him, and flourished a knife in her face—a short, thick, sharp; piece of rusty iron.

"We-ell?"

"Ekh, if you would only cut my throat,"—said Matréna, with a deep sigh, and freeing herself from his grasp, she turned away from him again. Then he, also, staggered back from her, startled, not by her words, but by the tone of them. He had heard those words from her lips before, had heard them more than once—but she had never uttered them in that manner. And the fact that she had turned away from him without fearing the knife, also augmented his amazement and discomfiture. Several seconds earlier it would have been easy for him to strike her, but now he could not do it, and did not wish to do it. Almost frightened by her indifference to his threat, he flung the knife on the table, and with dull wrath he asked his wife:

[Pg 82]

"Devil! What is it you want?"

"I don't want anything!"—cried Matréna, sighing.—"And what do you want? Did you come to kill me? Well, then, kill me!"

Grigóry looked at her, and held his peace, not knowing what he could do now, and seeing nothing clearly in his tangled thoughts. He had come with a definite intention to conquer his wife. On the preceding day, during their clash, she had been stronger than he; he was conscious of that, and it lowered him in his own eyes. It was imperatively necessary that she should submit to him, he did not understand why, but he did know solidly, that it was necessary. Passionate by nature, he had gone through a great deal and had thought a great deal about the matter during those four and twenty hours, and—being an ignorant man—he did not know how to single out of the chaos those feelings which had been aroused by the just accusation boldly hurled at him by his wife. He understood that this was a revolt against him, and he had brought the knife with him, in order to frighten Matréna; he would have killed her, but she offered a less passive resistance to his desire to subjugate her. But here she was in front of him, helpless, overwhelmed with grief and yet stronger than he. It angered him to perceive this, and this anger had a sobering effect upon him.

"Listen!"—he said,—"and don't you put on any conceited airs! You know that I, in downright earnest ... will drive this into your ribs—and that's the end of you! That will put an end to the whole matter!?.. It's very simple...."

Conscious that he was not saying the proper thing, Grigóry paused. Matréna did not move, as she stood turned away from him. A feverishly-rapid reckoning up[Pg 83] of all that she had gone through with her husband was in progress within her, and this imperative question throbbed in her heart:

"What will happen now?"

"Mótrya!"—Grigóry began suddenly and softly, propping himself with one hand on the table, and bending toward his wife.—"Am I to blame, if ... everything isn't.. if it isn't as it should be?... This is very disgusting to me!"

He twisted his head about and sighed.

"I'm so sick of it! I'm so cramped here on earth! Is this life? Come, let's take the cholera patients,—what are they? Are they a support to me? Some will die, and others will get well,... and I must go on living again. How am I to live? it's not life—only convulsions ... isn't that enough to make a man angry? I understand everything, you see, only it's difficult for me to say that I can't live so ... but how I want to live ... I don't know! They heal those sick people yonder, and give them every attention—... but I'm healthy, and if my soul aches, am I any the less valuable than they? Just think of it—I'm worse off than a cholera patient.... I have convulsions in my heart—that's what the trouble is!... And you shriek at me! Do you think I'm a wild beast? A drunkard, and—that's the end of it? Ekh you ... you woman! you wooden...."

He spoke quietly and persuasively, but she did not hear his speech well, busy as she was in reviewing the past.

"Now you won't speak.. said Gríshka, lending an ear to something new and powerful which was springing up within him.—"And why do you remain silent? What do you want?"

[Pg 84]

"I want nothing from you!"—exclaimed Matréna ...—"Why do you hammer away at me? Why do you torture me? What do you want?"

"What? Why ... that, of course..."

But Orlóff became conscious that he could not tell his wife exactly what he wanted,—that everything should immediately become clear, so to speak, both to him and to her. He comprehended that something had formed between them which could not be removed by any words whatever ...

Then a wild anger flashed up suddenly and vividly within him. Flourishing his arm, he dealt his wife a blow with his fist on the nape of her neck, and roared, like a wild beast:

"What are you about, you witch, hey? Why are you playing? I'll kill you, you carrion!"

The blow drove her, face down, upon the table, but she instantly sprang to her feet, and, looking straight in her husband's face, with a gaze of hatred, she said firmly, loudly and curtly:

"Beat away!"

"Shut up!"

"Beat! Well?"

"Akh, you devil!"

"Ho, Grigóry, there's been enough of that. I won't have any more of it...."

"Shut up!"

"I won't allow you to jeer at me...."

He gnashed his teeth, and retreated from her a pace—perhaps with the object of hitting her more conveniently.

But, at that moment, the door opened, and Doctor Yáshtchenko made his appearance on the threshold.

"Wha-at's the meaning of this? Where are you, hey?[Pg 85] What sort of a performance are you going through with?"

His face was stem and astounded. Orlóff was not in the slightest degree abashed at the sight of him, and he even bowed to him, saying:

"It's—.. disinfection between husband and wife."

And he laughed convulsively in the doctor's face.

"Why didn't you present yourself for duty?"—shouted the doctor sharply, incensed by the laugh.

Gríshka shrugged his shoulders, and calmly declared:

"I was busy ... about my own affairs...."

"So ... yes! And who was making that row here last night?"

"We...."

"You? Very good.... You behave yourselves in domestic fashion ... you prowl about without leave...."

"We're not serfs, so...."

"Silence! You've turned this into a dram-shop ... you beasts! I'll show you where you are!"

A flood of wild daring, of passionate longing to overturn everything, to tear the confusion out of his hunted soul, overwhelmed Gríshka, in a burning tide. It seemed to him that he would now do something unusual, and, at the same time, deliver his dark soul from the entanglements which now held it in bondage. He shuddered, felt an agreeable sensation of cold in his heart, and turning to the doctor with a sort of cat-like grimace, he said:

"Don't you bother your gullet, don't yell.... I know where I am—in the exterminating house!"

"Wha-at? What did you say?"—the astonished doctor bent toward him.

Gríshka understood that he had uttered a savage word,[Pg 86] but he did not cool down, for all that, but waxed all the hotter.

"Never mind, it will pass off! Digest that!... Matréna! Get ready to go!"

"No, my dear fellow, stop! You must answer me...." uttered the doctor, with ominous composure.—"You scoundrel, I'll give it to you for this...."

Gríshka stared point-blank at him, and began to talk, with the sensation that he was leaping off somewhere, and with every leap he breathed more and more freely.

"Don't you shout, Andréi Stepánovitch ... don't swear.... You think that, because there's cholera, you can order me about. 'Tis a vain dream.... That you cure people, nobody needs to be told.—And what I said about extermination was, of course, an idle word, and I was angry.... But don't you yell so much, all the same...."

"No, you lie!"—said the doctor calmly.... "I'll give you a lesson ... hey, there, come hither!"

People were already standing in the corridor.... Gríshka screwed up his eyes, and set his teeth.

"No, I'm not lying, and I'm not afraid ... but if you want to give me a lesson, I'll tell you for your convenience."

"We-ell? Say it...."

"I'll go to the town, and I'll spread the news: 'My lads! Do you know how they cure the cholera?'"

"Wha-at?"—and the doctor opened his eyes widely.

"So when we had that disinfection there with limination ...."

"What are you saying, devil take you!"—cried the doctor in a dull tone.—Irritation had given way in him to amazement in the presence of that young fellow whom he[Pg 87] had known as an industrious, far from unintelligent workman, and who now, no one knew why, was foolishly and stupidly running his neck into the noose....

"What nonsense are you chattering, you fool?"

"Fool!"—rang like an echo through Gríshka's whole being. He understood that this verdict was just, and he became all the more angry.

"What am I saying? I know ... I don't care ...." he said, with wildly flashing eyes....—"Now I understand why the like of me never cares ... and it's utterly useless for us to restrain ourselves in our feelings.... Matréna, get ready!"

"I won't go!" announced Matréna firmly.

The doctor stared at them with round eyes, and rubbed his brow, comprehending nothing.

"You're ... either a drunken man or a crazy man! Do you understand what you are doing?" Gríshka would not, could not yield. In reply to the doctor, he said, ironically:

"And how do you understand it? What are you doing? Disinfection, ha, ha! You heal the sick ... while the well people die with the narrowness of their life.... Matréna! I'll smash your pate! Go...."

"I won't go with you!"

She was pale, and unnaturally motionless, but her eyes gazed firmly and coldly into her husband's face ... Gríshka, despite all his heroic courage, turned away from her, and hanging his head, made no reply.

"Faugh!" and the doctor spat.—"The devil himself couldn't make out the meaning of this.... Here you! Begone! Take yourself off, and be thankful that I haven't been severe with you ... you ought to be arrested ... you blockhead! Get out!"

[Pg 88]

Grigóry glanced, in silence, at the doctor, and then dropped his head again. He would have felt better if they had thrashed him, or even sent him to the police-station.... But the doctor was a kind man, and perceived that Orlóff was almost irresponsible.

"For the last time, I ask you, will you go?" Gríshka hoarsely asked his wife.

"No, I will not go,"—she answered, and bent down a little, as though in expectation of a blow.

Gríshka waved his hand.

"Well ... the devil take the whole lot of you!—And what the devil do I want you for, anyway?"

"You're a savage blockhead," began the doctor, argumentatively.

"Don't you bark!" shouted Gríshka.—"Well, you cursed trollop, I'm going! I think we shall never see each other again ... but perhaps we shall ... that will be as I choose! But if we do meet again—it won't be good for you, I warn you!"

And Orlóff moved toward the door.

"Good-bye ... tragedian!..." said the doctor sardonically, when Gríshka came on a level with him.

Grigóry halted, and raising his mournful flashing eyes to him, he said in a repressed, low tone:

"Don't you touch me ... don't wind the spring up tight ... it has unwound, and hasn't hit anybody ... so let it go at that."

He picked up his cap from the floor, stuck it on his head, bristled up, and went out, without even glancing at his wife.

The doctor gazed searchingly at her. She stood before him pale, with an insensible sort of face.—The doctor nodded his head in the direction of Grigóry, and asked her:

[Pg 89]

"What is the matter with him?"

"I don't know...."

"Hm.... And where will he go now?"

"On a drunken spree!"—replied Mrs. Orlóff firmly.

The doctor frowned and went away.

Matréna looked out of the window. The figure of a man was moving swiftly along, in the evening twilight, through wind and rain, from the barracks to the town. The figure was alone, in the midst of the wet, gray plain ... The face of Matréna Orlóff turned still paler, she went into a corner, fell on her knees, and began to pray, zealously executing ground-reverences,[18] sighing out her petitions in a passionate whisper, and rubbing her breast and her throat with hands which trembled with emotion.

[18] That is—touching the forehead to the floor.—Translator.

*

One day I was inspecting the trade-school in N.... My guide was a well-known man, one of its founders. He conducted me over this model school, and explained things to me:

"As you see, we have reason to boast.... Our nurseling is growing and developing splendidly. The teaching corps are wonderfully well matched. In the boot and shoe shop, for example, we have a woman teacher, a plain female shoemaker, a peasant woman, that is to say, even a very ordinary peasant woman, such a dainty, roguish creature, but of irreproachable conduct.—However, devil take that side of the matter.... Ye-es! So then, as I was saying, that shoemaker is a simple little peasant woman, but how she does work!... how cleverly she teaches her trade, with what love she treats the little children—it's amazing! she's an invaluable worker.... She works for twelve rubles a month, and lodgings at the[Pg 90] school ... and she supports two orphans, to hoot, on her scanty means! She's a very interesting figure, I must tell you."

He praised the woman shoemaker so zealously that he evoked in me a desire to make her acquaintance. This was soon arranged, and one day Matréna Ivánovna Orlóff narrated to me the sad story of her life. For a while, after she had separated from her husband, he gave her no rest:—He came to her in a drunken condition, kicked up rows, spied on her everywhere, and was merciless. She bore it patiently.

When the barracks were closed the woman doctor suggested to Matréna Ivánovna that she should get a place at the school, and defend her against her husband. Both undertakings were successful, and Mrs. Orlóff entered upon a tranquil, laborious life: under the guidance of her acquaintances, the women medical practitioners, she learned to read and write, took two orphans out of the asylum to rear,—a girl and a boy,—and was working away, content with herself, with grief and terror recalling her past. She was perfectly devoted to her pupils, understood the significance of her activity in a broad sense, discharged it in a thoroughly competent manner, and had won general interest and sympathy for herself among the managers of the school. But she was coughing with a dry, suspicious cough, an ominous flush burned on her sunken cheeks, and her gray eyes held much melancholy. Her married life with uneasy Gríshka was taking effect.

But he had dropped his wife, and it was now the third year since he had annoyed her. He sometimes made his appearance in N., but did not show himself to Matréna. He was "on the tramp," as she defined to me his manner of life.

I succeeded in making his acquaintance. I found him in one of the dives of the town, and after two or three sittings, he and I became friends. After repeating to me the story which his wife had told me, he meditated for a little while, and then said:

"So you see, Maxím Savvátievitch, it raised me up, and then dashed me down. So I never performed any heroic deed. Even to this day, I long to distinguish myself in some way.... I'd like to mash up the whole earth into dust or assemble a gang of comrades and kill off all the Jews ... down to the very last one! Or, in general, something which would set me up above all men, and so that I could spit on them from a height.... And say to them: 'Akh, you reptiles! Why do you live? How do you live? You're a pack of hypocritical rascals, that's all you are!' And then, I'd kick up my heels from above or there below, and ... they'd smash into bits! Ye-es, so I would! Devil take it ... it's tiresome! And akh, how tiresome and narrow life is to me!... I thought, when I got rid of Matréshka:—'Co-ome now, Grínya,[19] sail away into freedom, the anchor's weighed!' On the contrary, it didn't come out that way—the channel was shallow! Stop! And I ran aground.... But I shan't dry up, never fear! I shall display myself! How?—the devil only knows that!... My wife? Well I consign her to all the devils! Does a man like me want a wife?... What should I do with her ... when I feel drawn in all four quarters at once?... I was born with uneasiness in my heart ... and it is my fate to be a tramp! The very best position in the world is free—and yet cramped! I've walked and ridden in all directions,... and found no consolation.... Do I drink? Of course, and what of that? Vodka extinguishes the heart, all the same.... And my heart bums with a great fire.... Everything is repulsive—towns, villages, people of different calibres ... Faugh! Can't anything better be invented? They're all down on one another.... I'd like to choke the whole lot of them! Ekh, life, you're the devil's great wisdom!"

[19] Another variation of Grigóry.—Translator.

The heavy door of the dram-shop where Orlóff and I were sitting, kept opening incessantly, creaking in a voluptuous sort of way as it did so. And the interior of the dram-shop aroused one's imagination of some sort of wild beast's maw, which was slowly but inevitably devouring, one after the other, the poor Russian people, the uneasy and the rest.