Short Fiction

Coward

The war is decidedly giving me no rest. I see clearly that it is dragging, and when it will end is very difficult to foretell. Our soldiers are as splendid as ever, but the enemy has proved far from being as weak as we thought, and now, four months from the declaration of war, no decisive success has been gained by our side. In the meanwhile every extra day claims its hundreds of victims. Is it my nerves which cause the telegrams merely stating the numbers of killed and wounded to affect me far more than those around me? Somebody will calmly read out: “Our losses insignificant; officers, wounded, so many, giving names; rank and file, killed, 50; wounded, 100,” and even rejoice that the numbers are so small; but to me the reading of such news immediately brings the whole bloody picture before my eyes. Fifty dead, one hundred maimed⁠—this is “insignificant!” Why are we so horrified when the newspapers inform us of some murder where the victims are few? Why does not the sight of corpses riddled with bullets lying on a battlefield strike us with the same horror as the interior of a house ransacked by murder? Why does a catastrophe costing the lives of some scores of persons cause all Russia to cry out, whilst nobody pays any attention to advanced-guard skirmishes with “insignificant” losses, also of some scores of men?

A few days ago Lvoff, a medical student and a friend of mine, with whom I often argue about the war, said to me: “Well, we shall see, my peaceful friend, what will become of your humanitarian convictions when you are called up and are obliged to fire at people.”

“Me, Vassili Petrovich? They will not call me up. I am in the Militia Reserve.”

“That may be, but if the war drags on it will affect the Militia as well. Do not be too sure about it. Your turn will come.”

My heart seemed to contract. How was it that this thought had not come into my head before? Of course the Militia will be called up. There was nothing impossible in that. “If the war drags on,” and it is sure to drag on. Even if this war does not last long it is all the same, some other war will commence. Why not have a war? Why not perform great exploits? It seems to me that the present war is only the forerunner of future wars from which I shall not escape, nor my little brother, nor even my sister’s baby boy. And my turn will come very soon.

What will become of your “ego”? Your whole being protests against the war, but nevertheless the war will compel you to shoulder a rifle, and go to die⁠ ⁠… and kill.⁠ ⁠… No, it is impossible! I am a quiet, kindhearted young man who has up till now known only his books, the lecture-room, the family circle, and one or two close friends; who has dreamt in one or two years’ time of beginning other work, the labour of love and of truth. I have been accustomed to regard this world objectively, accustomed to place it before me. I have imagined I understood all the evil in it, and so would be able to avoid this evil. But now I see my whole building of tranquillity destroyed, and I see myself automatically fitting on to my shoulders those same tatters, holes, and stains which I have hitherto only looked at. And no kind of development, no self-knowledge, no knowledge of the world, no kind of spiritual liberty will give me a pitiful physical liberty⁠—the liberty to dispose of my own body.

Lvoff laughs when I begin to expound my views against the war to him.

“My dear old chap, look at things more simply, life will be easier then,” says he. “Do you think that this carnage is to my taste? Apart from the fact that it will bring misfortune on all, it also affects me personally. It will not let me finish my studies. They will reduce the term of the courses, and send us out to cut off legs and arms. For all that I do not worry myself with fruitless reflections on the horrors of war, because, whatever I may think, I can do nothing to abolish it. Surely it is better not to think about it, but to mind one’s own business? If they send us to treat the wounded, I shall go and do so. What is to be done in such a time as this? One must sacrifice oneself. By the way, do you know that Masha is going as a hospital nurse?”

“Not really?”

“The day before yesterday she made up her mind, and today has gone to practise bandaging. I did not try to dissuade her, but only asked her how she intends to arrange about her studies.

“ ‘Afterwards,’ she says⁠ ⁠… ‘I will study afterwards if I am alive.’ Never mind; let her go as a nurse. It will do her good.”

“And what about Kuzma Thomich?”

“Kuzma says nothing, only he has become almost ferociously gloomy, and has quite given up studying. I am glad for his sake that my sister is going. He is simply wasting away, and is in torture. He follows her like her shadow and does nothing. Well⁠—it is love!” and Vassili Petrovich shook his head. “He has rushed off now to escort her home, as if she has not always gone about alone!”

“It seems to me, Vassili Petrovich, that it is a pity he lives with you.”

“Of course it is a pity, but who could have foreseen this? For myself and sister this lodging is too large. There was one room too many. Why not let it to a nice man? And a nice man took it and has fallen in love. And I am sorry, and it is sad for her. How is Kuzma beneath her? He is a kind, intelligent, good chap. But she literally does not seem to notice him. But now make yourself scarce. I have no time to waste. If you want to see my sister and Kuzma, wait in the dining-room. They will be back soon.”

“No, Vassili Petrovich, I also have no time to spare. Goodbye.”

I had only just got into the street when I saw Mary Petrovna and Kuzma. They were coming along without speaking. Mary Petrovna in front, with a determined, concentrated expression on her face, and Kuzma a little to one side behind her, literally not daring to walk alongside her, but from time to time casting a hurried glance towards her face. They passed by without seeing me.

I can do nothing and think of nothing. I have read the account of the third fight before Plevna. Twelve thousand casualties amongst the Russians and Romanians alone!⁠—without counting the Turks⁠—twelve thousand!⁠ ⁠… These figures come before me in the form of an endless, drawn-out string of corpses lying side by side. If placed shoulder to shoulder they would form a road eight versts long.

“What is this?”

They tell me something about Skobeloff: that he hurled himself at some place, attacked something, took some fort, or they have taken it from him⁠—I do not remember. In this awful affair I understand and see only one thing⁠—a mountain of corpses serving as a pedestal for grandiose matters which will be inscribed on the pages of history. Perhaps it is necessary⁠—I will not take it upon myself to judge, and I cannot. I am not arguing about the war, but regard it with a direct feeling aroused by the wholesale shedding of blood. The bullock before the eyes of which other bullocks are slaughtered probably experiences something similar. It does not understand why it is to be killed, and only gazes terrified, with starting eyes, at the blood, and bellows in a despairing, heartrending manner.

Am I a coward or not?

Today I was told that I am a coward. Certainly it was a very shallow-minded person who said so when I declared in her presence my unwillingness to go to the war, and expressed a fear that they will call me up to serve. Her opinion did not distress me, but raised the question⁠—Am I really a coward? Perhaps all my aversion against what everyone else considers a great matter only arises from fear of my skin! Is it really worth while to worry about any one unimportant life in view of a great matter? And am I capable of subjecting my life to danger generally for the sake of any matter?

I did not occupy myself for any length of time with these questions. I recalled my whole life, all those occasions⁠—truth to say, not many⁠—on which I have been brought face to face with danger, and I could not charge myself with cowardice. I did not fear for my life then, and I do not now. Consequently it is not death which frightens me.⁠ ⁠…

Always fresh battles, fresh mortal suffering. After reading the papers I can do nothing. In books, instead of letters, I see prostrate rows of human beings. My pen seems a weapon inflicting black wounds on the white paper. If this goes much further it will become regular hallucinations. But now a new trouble has appeared which has somewhat taken me away from the everlasting oppressing thought.

Yesterday evening I went to the Lvoffs and found them at tea. The brother and sister were sitting at the table, but Kuzma was pacing quickly from corner to corner of the room, holding his hand to a swollen face tied up with a handkerchief.

“What is the matter?” I asked him.

He did not answer, but only made a gesture with his hand and continued his pacing.

“His teeth have been aching, and an enormous abscess has formed,” said Mary Petrovna. “I begged him at the time to go and see a doctor, but he would not listen to me, and now see what it has come to.”

“The doctor will be here directly. I went for him,” said Vassili Petrovich.

“Very necessary,” murmured Kuzma through his teeth.

“Of course, when it might easily turn into something most serious, and you still keep walking about, in spite of my entreaties to lie down. Do you know how this sometimes ends?”

“It is all the same how it ends,” muttered Kuzma.

“Not at all, Kuzma Thomich,” put in Mary Petrovna quietly. “Do not talk nonsense.”

These words were sufficient to calm Kuzma. He even sat down at the table and asked for some tea. Mary Petrovna poured some out, and handed him the glass. When he took the glass from her hand his face took on a triumphant expression which was so incongruous with the comical appearance given him by his swollen cheek that I could not help smiling. Lvoff also laughed. Only Mary Petrovna looked seriously and compassionately at Kuzma.

The doctor arrived, a fresh-looking, ruddy-complexioned man with cheeks like rosy apples and a most cheery manner. But when he examined the patient’s neck his usual cheery expression changed to one of some concern.

“Come along,” said he, “let us go into your room. I must have a good look at you.”

I went after them to Kuzma’s room. The doctor placed him on the bed and commenced to examine the upper portion of his chest, carefully tapping it with his fingers.

“H’m, you must lie quietly and not get up. Have you any friends who would give up some of their spare time for you?” inquired the doctor.

“I think so,” replied Kuzma in a perplexed tone.

“I would ask them,” said the doctor, turning politely to me, “to look after the patient from today, and if any new symptoms appear to come for me.”

He left the room. Lvoff escorted him to the passage, where they talked for a long time in low tones about something, and I went to Mary Petrovna. She was sitting in a thoughtful pose, resting her head on one hand, and with the other was slowly stirring her tea.

“The doctor has ordered someone to watch Kuzma.”

“Is there really any danger?” Mary Petrovna asked with alarm.

“Probably there is⁠—otherwise, why should it be necessary to watch him? You will not refuse to look after him?”

“Of course not. I have not gone to the war, but yet must turn nurse. Let us go to him. It must be very dull for him to lie all alone.”

Kuzma met us smiling, so far as his swollen cheek allowed him to do so.

“Thank you,” he said, “and I was already beginning to think you had forgotten me.”

“No, Kuzma Thomich, we will not forget you now. We must look after you. See what becomes of disobedience,” said Mary Petrovna smilingly.

“And shall you?” timidly asked Kuzma.

“Yes, yes, only you will have to obey me.”

Kuzma closed his eyes and reddened with pleasure.

“Ah, yes,” said he suddenly, turning to me. “Give me the looking-glass; it is lying on the table.”

I gave him a small round looking-glass. Kuzma begged me to show him the light, and with the help of the glass he looked at the place. After this his face darkened, and, notwithstanding that we three tried to make him talk, he never uttered a word all the evening.

Today they have told me that they will soon call up the Militia. I have expected it, and was not much surprised. I could get out of the fate I so fear. I could make use of certain influential friends, and stay in St. Petersburg at my post. They could “arrange” it for me, or send me as a clerk. But first I dislike resorting to such means, and second something vague and undefined within me is weighing up my position, and forbids me shirk the war. “It is not right,” says a little voice inside me.

Something I never dreamt of has happened.

I went this morning to relieve Mary Petrovna in watching Kuzma. She met me at the door with tear-stained eyes, pale and worn out with a sleepless night.

“What is the matter, Mary Petrovna?”

“Hush!” she whispered. “Do you know all is ended?”

“What is ended? He is not dead?”

“No, no, not yet⁠—but there is no possible hope. Both doctors⁠—we called in another⁠—” Tears prevented her from saying more.

“Come and look at him.”

“You must first dry those tears and drink some water. You will quite upset him.”

“It is all the same. Does not he know already! He knew yesterday when he asked for the glass. He would soon have been a doctor himself.”

The heavy atmosphere of an operating theatre filled the room in which the sick man lay. His bed had been moved into the middle of the room. His long legs, huge body, and arms stretched by his sides, showed up clearly under the blanket. His eyes were closed, and he was breathing slowly and heavily. It seemed to me that he had grown thinner in one night. His face was sticky and moist, and had an unpleasant greenish tinge.

“What is the matter with him?” I asked in a whisper.

“Let him tell you. You stay with him. I cannot.”

She left the room, hiding her face in her hands and convulsed with the sobs she was trying to restrain, and I sat down near the bed and waited until he should awake. There was an oppressive stillness in the room. Only the rare, heavy breathing of the sick man was heard and the soft ticking of a watch lying on a little table near the bed. I looked at his face, which was scarcely recognizable. It was not that his features had changed so much, but that I saw an entirely new light in them. I had known Kuzma for a long time, and we were friends, although not on especially intimate terms. I had never been on such terms with him as now. I recalled his life, disappointments, and joys as if they had been my own. In his love for Mary Petrovna I had hitherto seen more of the comic side, but now I understood what torments this being must have experienced. Was he really in such danger? I wondered. He cannot be. Surely a man cannot die from toothache! Mary Petrovna is crying about him, but he will recover, and all will be well.

He opened his eyes and saw me. Without changing the expression on his face, he said slowly, pausing after each word:

“How do you do?⁠—See what⁠—I am like.⁠—The end has come. Has come so⁠—stealthily, unexpectedly⁠—it is stupid.”

“Tell me, Kuzma, what is the matter with you? Perhaps it is nothing like so bad as all that.”

“Not so bad⁠—you say. No, no, old friend⁠—it is very bad. I do not make mistakes on such a simple matter as this. Look!”

He slowly and mechanically turned down the blanket and unbuttoned his shirt. Commencing from the right side of his neck was a dark, unpleasant-looking patch, the size of one’s hand, extending to his chest⁠—gangrene.

For four days now by the sick man’s bedside I have not closed my eyes, sitting first with Mary Petrovna and then with her brother. The patient appears to be barely living, yet life seems to be unwilling to leave his strong body. They have cut out the dead flesh, and the doctors have ordered us to wash the gaping wound left by the operation every two hours. Every two hours we two or three go to his bed, turn him over, raise his huge body, and wash the terrible wound with carbolic acid through a gutta-percha tube. It sprays the wound, and Kuzma sometimes finds strength even to smile because he explains “it tickles.” As is the case with all persons who are rarely ill, he likes being nursed and tended like a child, and when Mary Petrovna takes in her hands what he calls “the reins of government”⁠—that is, the gutta-percha tube⁠—and begins to spray, he is especially pleased, and declares that no one can do this so skilfully as she, notwithstanding the fact that her trembling hands often cause the bed to be soaked with water.

How their relations have altered! Mary Petrovna, who had been something unattainable for him, on whom he had gazed and feared, who had never taken any notice of him, now nurses him tenderly, and often sits crying quietly by his bedside. And he calmly accepts it all as a matter of course, and talks to her as would a father to his little daughter.

Sometimes he suffers very much. His wound burns and fever racks him.⁠ ⁠… Then strange thoughts come into my brain. To me Kuzma seems one of those of whom there are tens of thousands mentioned in the reports. By his pain and sufferings I attempt to measure the evil caused by the war. How much suffering and anguish here in one room, on one bed⁠—and yet all this is merely one drop in the sea of sorrow and agony being experienced by the enormous number of those whom they are sending forward only to lie on the field in heaps of dead or still groaning, bloodstained, plundered bodies.

I must ask Lvoff or Mary Petrovna to take my place, if only for a couple of hours, whilst I have a rest. I am utterly worn out from want of sleep and my depressing thoughts.

I was sleeping soundly, curled up on the little sofa, when I was awakened by someone touching my shoulder.

“Get up! get up!” said Mary Petrovna.

I jumped up instantly, without at first understanding anything. Mary Petrovna whispered something rapidly in a frightened manner to me.

“Spots! new spots!” I gathered at last.

“What spots, and where?”

“Oh dear, dear! he does not understand,” she wailed. “New spots have appeared on Kuzma Thomich. I have already sent for the doctor.”

“But perhaps it is nothing,” said I, with the indifference of a just-awakened man.

“How nothing? Look for yourself.”

Kuzma was wrapped in a heavy, restless sleep. He kept tossing his head from side to side, and sometimes groaned deeply. His chest was bare, and I saw on it, an inch or so below the bandaged wound, two new little black spots. The gangrene had penetrated further under the skin, and spreading under it, had come to the surface in two places. Although before this I had little hope of his recovery, these new unmistakable symptoms of death made me turn pale.

Mary Petrovna sat in a corner of the room with her hands on her knees, and silently gazed at me with despairing eyes.

“You must not despair,” I said to her. “The doctor will be here directly, and will examine him. Perhaps it is not yet all over, and perhaps we shall yet pull him round.”

“No, he will die,” she whispered.

“Well, if he dies,” I answered, also quietly, “it will, of course, be a great grief to all of us, but you must not wear yourself out in this manner. You look half dead.”

“You do not understand what tortures I suffer these days. I cannot myself explain why I did not love him, and even now do not love him, in the way he does me. But if he dies my heart will break. I shall always remember his steady, open glance, his persistent silence when near me, although he liked talking, and could talk well. I shall always reproach myself that I did not take pity on him, did not appreciate his cleverness, his love, his devotion. Perhaps this seems ridiculous to you, but the thought is a constant torture to me now that if I had loved him⁠—we should have lived quite differently. All would have happened differently, and this awful and stupid business would not have happened. One thinks and thinks, excuses and justifies oneself, but all the time at the bottom of one’s mind something keeps saying⁠—Your fault, your fault, your fault!”

At that moment I glanced at the patient, fearing that our whispering would awaken him, and saw a change in his face. He had awaked, and was listening to what Mary Petrovna was saying, but did not wish to show he was. His lips trembled, his cheeks burned, his whole face was lighted up literally as if by the sun, just as a wet, sombre-looking field is brightened up when the clouds above it open and allow a ray of sunshine to peep through. He had evidently forgotten about his sickness and fear of death. Only one feeling filled him, and two tears trickled from his closed and trembling eyelids. Mary Petrovna looked at him for a second or two half-frightenedly, and then blushed. A soft expression flashed into her face, and, bending over the poor half-corpse, she kissed him.

Then he opened his eyes. “My God, how I do not want to die!” he murmured. And suddenly strange, quiet sobbing sounds filled the room⁠—sounds quite new to me, who had never seen this man cry. I left the room, I was almost breaking down myself.

I also do not want to die, and all these thousands do not want to die. Kuzma at least has found consolation in his last moments⁠—but there at the war! Kuzma, for all his fear of death and his physical suffering, would scarcely change these present moments for any others of his life. No, it is not that at all! Death will always be death, but to die amidst those near and dear to one, and falling into the mud and one’s own blood, momentarily expecting someone will come up and finish you off, or that guns will ride over you and crush you like a worm.

“I tell you frankly,” said the doctor to me in the passage, as he put on his shuba and galoshes, “that with similar cases in hospitals ninety-nine out of one hundred are fatal. I can only hope on the attentive nursing, the wonderful spirits of the patient, and his burning desire to recover.”

“Every sick person longs to recover, doctor.”

“Of course, but your friend has certain vivifying circumstances,” said the doctor, with a smile. “And so this evening we shall operate again, and hope for the best.”

He shook my hand, and went off on his rounds, leaving behind him the smell of his bearskin shuba. In the evening he came with his instruments.

“Perhaps you would like, my embryo colleague, to operate for practice,” said he, turning to Lvoff. Lvoff nodded his head in assent, turned up his sleeves, and with a serious, gloomy expression on his face, began. I saw how he inserted some wonderful-looking, three-edged instrument into the wound, and saw how Kuzma, as the keen edge pierced his body, clutched the bedstead with his hands and clenched his teeth with the pain.

“Don’t be an old woman,” said Lvoff to him gruffly, placing a tampon into the new wound.

“Does it hurt very much?” asked Mary Petrovna tenderly.

“Not so very much, dearie, but I have grown weak, and am worn out.”

They bandaged him, gave him some wine, and he calmed down. The doctor left, and I, with Mary Petrovna, began to put the room in order.

“Put the clothes right,” murmured Kuzma in an even, dull voice. “There is a draught.”

I commenced to readjust his pillows and bedclothes according to his directions, which he gave very irritably, declaring that somewhere about his left elbow there was a small opening through which the cold was coming, and begging me to tuck the clothes in better. I tried to do my best, but notwithstanding all my efforts Kuzma still felt a draught, now at his side, then by his feet.

“You are very awkward,” he grumbled. “There is a draught again at my back. Let her.” He glanced at Mary Petrovna, and then it became quite clear to me why I was unable to please him.

Mary Petrovna put down the medicine-glass which was in her hand and went to the bed. “Make you comfortable?” she said.

“Put the things right. That’s right⁠—and warm now.”

He watched her whilst she settled the bedclothes, then closed his eyes, and, with a childishly happy expression on his worn face, dropped asleep.

“Are you going home?” asked Mary Petrovna.

“No, I have had a good sleep and can watch now, but if I am not wanted I will go.”

“No, don’t go, please. Let us have a little talk. My brother is in his room all the time with his books, and it is so bitter, so depressing, to sit alone with the patient whilst he is sleeping and think of nothing but his death.”

“You must be strong, Mary Petrovna; depressing thoughts and tears are strictly forbidden to hospital nurses.”

“And I, too, will not cry when I am a nurse. Anyhow, it will not be so hard to nurse the wounded as one so near.”

“Then in any case you are going?”

“Of course I am going. Whether he recovers or dies I am going. I have become so accustomed to the idea now that I cannot give it up. I want to do something good, something useful; I want to be able to remember good, bright days.”

“Ah, Mary Petrovna, I am afraid you will not see much light at the war.”

“Why? I shall work. But there is light for you. I should like even to take some part in the war.”

“To take part in it! But surely, does it not inspire you with horror? What are you telling me?”

“I am telling⁠—who told you that I love war? Only⁠—how shall I tell you?⁠—war⁠—is an evil. Both you and I and very many others have this opinion. But it is inevitable. Whether you like it or do not like it makes no difference. There will be war, and if you do not go to fight they will take someone else, and, anyhow⁠—mankind will be mutilated or tortured by its course. I am afraid you do not understand me, as I express myself badly. Listen! In my idea war is a common sorrow, a common suffering, and to avoid it is perhaps permissible, only such a course is not pleasing to me.”

I kept silence. Mary Petrovna’s words very clearly expressed my confused aversion to avoid the war. I myself have felt what she feels and thinks, only I have thought differently.

“You,” she continued, “it seems, are all the time thinking how you can remain here if they call you up for a soldier. My brother has spoken to me about it. You know I like you very much, and think you a nice man, but this trait in your character distresses me.”

“What is to be done, Mary Petrovna? Different views. What shall I reply? Was it I who started the war?”

“Not you, or any of those who have died at it, or will die. They also would not have gone if they could have avoided it, but they cannot, and you can. They go to fight and you stay in St. Petersburg, alive, sound, and lucky, only because you have friends who would be sorry to send someone they know personally to the war. I will not take upon myself to judge⁠—perhaps it is excusable, but I repeat, it distresses me.”

She energetically shook her curly head and said no more.

At last it has come. Today I put on a grey overcoat and have already tasted of the roots of military training⁠—the manual. At the present moment there is ringing in my ears⁠—“ ’Tion! Form fours! Present arms!”

And I stood to attention, formed fours, and flourished my rifle. And after a short time, when I have mastered the intricacies of forming fours, they will tell me off to a draft, place us in railway wagons, transport us, and distribute us amongst the regiments to fill up the vacancies left by the killed.⁠ ⁠…

Well, it is all the same. It is all over. Now I do not belong to myself. I shall go with the stream. Now it is best not to think and not to judge, but to accept without criticism all the chances of life, and only cry out when in pain.⁠ ⁠…

They have quartered me in a wing of the barracks specially detailed for the “privileged” class recruits. This wing is distinguished in having beds instead of bunks for sleeping accommodation, nevertheless it is quite sufficiently dirty. It is very bad amongst the non-privileged recruits. They live⁠—until told off to regiments⁠—in a huge shed which was formerly a riding-school. Two rows of tents have been fixed up in it. Straw has been carted as far as the door, and the rest is left to the temporary inhabitants to fix themselves up as best they may. Along the passage going down the middle of the riding-school, formed by the two rows of tents, the snow and filth brought in every minute from outside by persons entering has mingled with the straw, and has formed an indescribable slush. Even on either side of this passage the straw is not overclean. Some hundreds of men are standing, sitting, or lying on this straw in groups, each representing some village contingent, the whole forming a veritable ethnographical exhibition. I searched for representatives from my district. The tall, awkward “little Russians” in new overcoats and caps lay in a huddled group, not saying a word. There were ten of them.

“Good day, comrades.”

“Good day.”

“Is it long since you left home?”

“Two weeks. And who are you?” asked one of them of me. I gave him my name, which was known to all of them, and this meeting with someone from their part brightened them up a little, and they became more communicative.

“Lonely?” I asked.

“How not lonely?”

“Where are you going?”

“Who knows! I suppose to kill the Turk.”

“And do you want to go to the war?”

“What are we going to do there?”

I began to question them about our local town, and these recollections of home loosened their tongues. They commenced to tell me of a recent wedding for which a pair of bullocks had been sold, and how almost directly afterwards they had taken the young husband for a soldier. They told me about the pristav⁠—the devil stick in his throat!⁠—the lack of land, and how in consequence of this some hundreds had decided to leave the village and go to the Amur.⁠ ⁠… The conversation was only of the past, no one referred to the future, to those hard times, dangers, and sufferings which awaited us all. No one took any interest in the Turks or Bulgars, or troubled himself about the question for which he was perhaps going to die.

A drunken young recruit of a local contingent, passing us, stopped at our group, and when I again began to talk of the war authoritatively said:

“This Turk must be wiped out.”

“Must be?” I inquired, smiling involuntarily at the assurance of the decision.

“Of course, Barin, so that nothing shall remain of the unclean brute. Because through his mutinying how much suffering are we to undergo? Had he, for instance, kept quiet and behaved⁠—I should be at home now with my parents and in a better state. But he is fractious, and there is grief for us. Be assured I am speaking the truth. Give me a cigarette, barin, please.” And he suddenly stopped short, straightened himself in front of me, and put his hand to his cap.

I gave him a cigarette, said goodbye to my countrymen, and went back to barracks, as my leave was up.

“He is fractious, and there is grief for us,” and his drunken voice rang in my ears. Short and vague, but at the same time it covers all there is to be said.

Heartsickness and depression reign at the Lvoffs. Kuzma is very bad, and although the wound is clean, has very high fever, delirium, and great pain. Both brother and sister remain with him all the time I am engaged in learning my work. Now, when they know I am going to the war, the sister has grown still more depressed, and her brother still more surly.

“Already in uniform?” he had muttered when I said “How do you do?” to him in his room, littered with books and reeking of smoke. “Oh, you people!”

“Why, Vassili Petrovich?”

“Because you will not let me study⁠—that’s why. And as there is no time, they will not let me finish my course, but will send me to the war, and there is so much I cannot learn, and then there are you and Kuzma.”

“Well, Kuzma is dying, but what about me?”

“And are you not going to die? If they do not kill you, you will go out of your mind, or put a bullet through your head. I know you, and there are examples.”

“What examples? Do you really know of any like that? Tell me, Vassili Petrovich?”

“Stop talking. Is it so necessary further to disillusionize you? It is bad for you. I know nothing. I was only talking.”

But I was persistent, and then he told me of the example as follows:

“A wounded artillery officer told me,” he commenced. “They had only just left Kishinieff, in April, directly after the declaration of war. The rain was unceasing, and the roads disappeared. Only a sea of mud remained into which the guns and baggage-train sank up to the axles. It became so bad that the horses could do nothing, so they hitched on drag-ropes with which the men pulled. The second half of the road was awful. We had twelve ridges to get over in seventeen versts, and the whole distance was a perfect quagmire. They got into it and stuck. The rain lashed them, and there was not a dry thread on any of them. They were half starving and completely worn out, but it was necessary to drag the guns along. Well, of course, the men pulled and pulled until they fell senseless, face downwards, into the mud. Finally it was impossible to move ahead, but all the same they continued to toil. It was awful, said the officer; it is dreadful to think of it. They had a young surgeon with them, a nervous fellow who wept, and exclaiming that he could not stand such a sight, said he would go on ahead, which he did. The soldiers cut down branches and made what was almost a raft, and finally succeeded in getting out of the bog. They dragged the battery on to the mountain, and there saw the surgeon hanging on a tree. There is the example. If the man could not stand even seeing such suffering, how will you be able to stand it?”

“Vassili Petrovich, is it not easier to bear torture than to hang oneself like the surgeon?”

“Well, I do not know. What is there good in the fact that they will harness you to a shaft?”

“Conscience will not prick me, Vassili Petrovich.”

“Well, that is hairsplitting. Talk with my sister on that point⁠—she is well up in such fine distinctions.” Saying which he held out his hand and smilingly bade me goodbye.

“Where are you off to?”

“To the hospital.”

I went into Kuzma’s room. He was not asleep, and, as Mary Petrovna explained to me, felt better than usual. He had not yet seen me in uniform, and my appearance was an unpleasant surprise to him.

“Will they leave you here or send you to the army?” he asked.

“They will send me; surely you know?”

He was silent.

“I knew,” he said after a pause, “but I had forgotten. I cannot remember or think of much these days. Well, go! It is necessary.”

“And you, Kuzma Thomich, say this!”

“Why ‘and I’? Is it not true what I say? What services have you rendered that you should be exempted? Go and die! There are people more necessary than you, more hardworking than you, and they are going.⁠ ⁠… Put my pillow right⁠ ⁠… that’s better.”

He spoke quietly but irritably, as if blaming someone for his illness.

“All this is true, Kuzma. But could I really not go? Could I really protest personally on my own behalf? If so, I should have stayed here without further talk; it would not be difficult to arrange. I am not doing this⁠—they want me, and I am going. But at least they cannot prevent me from having my own opinion on this point.”

Kuzma lay motionless with his eyes fixed on the ceiling, as if he had not heard me. Finally he slowly turned his head towards me.

“Do not take any notice of my words. I”⁠—he murmured⁠—“I am worn out and irritable, and really do not know why I tease people. I have already grown quarrelsome, I shall soon die; it is time.”

“Enough, Kuzma; cheer up. The wound is clean and is healing, and everything is going on well. You must not talk of dying, but of living now.”

Mary Petrovna looked at me with her large, sorrowful eyes, and I suddenly remembered how she had said to me two weeks ago: “No, he will not recover; he will die.

“And if I really do recover, it will be good,” said Kuzma, smiling weakly. “They will send you to fight, and I, with Mary Petrovna, will come⁠—she as a hospital nurse, and I as a surgeon. And I will look after you when you are wounded, as you are looking after me now.”

“You will chatter, Kuzma,” said Mary Petrovna. “It is bad for you to talk much, and it is time to begin tormenting you.”

He resigned himself to us. We undressed him, took off the bandages, and commenced work on his huge and lacerated chest. When I directed the spray of water on the open places; on the collarbone, which glistened like mother-of-pearl; on a vein which, clean and free, ran right throughout the wound, it was not like dressing a living person, but like working on some anatomical apparatus. I thought of other wounds, far more awful in nature, and overwhelmingly greater in numbers, inflicted, moreover, not by blind, unreasoning chance, but by the conscious acts of human beings.

I am not writing a word in this diary of all that is happening at home, and what I am going through there. The tears with which my mother meets me, the depressing silence accompanying my presence at the common table, the kindness of my brothers and sisters⁠—all this is hard to witness and feel, but to write of it is harder still. When I think that in a week’s time I must say goodbye to all that is dearest in the world, the tears rise to my throat.

At last the farewells. Tomorrow morning, as soon as it is light, we are off by railway. They have allowed me to spend the last night at home, and I am sitting in my room alone for the last time. The last time! Does anyone know who has not experienced such a last time the whole misery of these two words? For the last time the family have separated, for the last time I have come into this little room, and am sitting at the table lighted by the familiar little lamp and littered with books and papers. For a whole month I have not touched them. For the last time I take the half-finished work into my hands. It has stopped short and lies dead, incomplete, senseless. Instead of finishing it I am going with thousands of others to the brink of the world because history has need of my physical strength. As for intellectual forces⁠—forget about them. No one wants them. Of what benefit have been the many years I have studied them and prepared myself to apply them? That enormous organization of which I know nothing, but of which I form a part, has wished to cut me off and hurl me aside. And what can I do against such a desire?

However, enough. It is time to lie down and try to sleep. Tomorrow I must get up very early.

I begged that no one should come to the station. But when I was already sitting in the wagon crammed full of men, I felt such a heart-pinching solitude and so homesick, that I would have given all the world to pass, if only a few minutes, with any one of my near relatives. Eventually the appointed hour arrived, but the train did not start. Something was delaying it. Half an hour went past, an hour, an hour and a half, and still we did not move. In this one and a half hours I could have gone home.⁠ ⁠… Perhaps, after all, someone will not be able to resist coming down.⁠ ⁠… No, they all imagine that the train has already gone. No one will think of it being late in starting. But still, perhaps⁠ ⁠… and I gaze anxiously in the direction whence they might come. Never has time dragged so.

The harsh notes of the bugle sounding the “assembly” made me shiver. Soldiers who had climbed out of the wagons and had crowded on to the platforms, hurriedly scrambled into their places. The train will be off in a minute, and I shall have seen no one. Then I catch sight of the Lvoffs. Brother and sister almost ran to the wagon, and I was madly glad to see them. I do not remember what I said to them, and do not remember what they said to me, except one sentence⁠—“Kuzma is dead!”

This sentence ends the notes in my diary.

Under a lowering sky lies a broad snow-covered field surrounded by white hills, on which are trees, also white with frost, although there is a touch of thaw in the air. Above the rattle of musketry comes the frequent boom of guns. One of the hills is almost enveloped in smoke, through which, as it slowly rolls down on to the field below, can be seen a dark, moving mass. Looking more attentively, it is seen that this mass is composed of little black spots. Many of these spots are already motionless, but others are ever moving forward, although their goal, indicated only by the extra density of the smoke, is still far away, and although their numbers become less every second.

A battalion in reserve, lying in the snow with rifles in hand, is following the progress of this dark mass with its thousand eyes.

“They have started!⁠—ours have started up!”

“But will they get there? Why do they keep us here? With our help they would quickly settle matters.”

“Tired of life, are you?” said an elderly soldier surlily. “Lie still and thank God you are whole.”

“Yes, old man, and I shall stay whole, don’t make any mistake about that,” replied a young soldier with a cheery face. “I have already been in four fights, and nothing happened. Only at first it is frightening, but then⁠—But the Barin⁠—it is his first time; he will be probably asking God’s pardon. Barin! Barin!”

“What is it?” replied a lanky, black-bearded man lying close by.

“You, Barin, cheer up!”

“I, my friend, am all right.”

“You, Barin, will be near me in case⁠ ⁠… I know, I have already been in it. Yes, our Barin is brave; he will not run away. But there was a volunteer before you who, as soon as we started, and directly the bullets began to fly, chucked away his knapsack and rifle, and bolted; but a bullet caught him up⁠—hit him in the back. That sort of thing is forbidden because of the oath.”

“Don’t you be alarmed. I shall not run away,” quietly replied the Barin. “You cannot get away from a bullet.”

“No, the rascal,” answered the young soldier. “Is it known where to get away from it?⁠ ⁠… Holy!⁠ ⁠… Surely ours have not stopped!”

The black mass had stopped, and were being enveloped in the smoke from their rifles.

“Well, they have begun to fire. That means in a minute or two they will commence retiring.⁠ ⁠… No! they have gone ahead again. Save!⁠ ⁠… Blessed Mother, again⁠ ⁠… and again.⁠ ⁠… How they are falling, and no one to pick them up!”

“A bullet! a bullet!” exclaimed several around, as something whistled through the air. It was a chance bullet which had passed over the reserves. It was followed by another, then a third. The battalion began to stir.

“Stretcher-bearers!” someone cried.

The stray bullet had done its work. Four soldiers with a stretcher ran forward towards the wounded man. Suddenly little figures of men and horses appeared on one of the hills on the flank of the attack, and at the same moment a puff of smoke, white as snow, showed up.

“They are firing at us, the blackguards!” cried the cheery young soldier. There was the scream of a shell followed by a report. The youngster threw himself face down into the snow. When he raised his head he saw that the Barin was lying stretched out alongside him, his arms thrown out, with his head doubled unnaturally under his chest. Another stray bullet had struck him under the right eye, making a large black hole.

Four Days

I remember how we rushed through the wood; how the leaves and twigs came fluttering and twisting down on us as the humming bullets cut their way through the thick foliage. I remember how, as we pushed through the thick and prickly undergrowth, the firing became hotter and the fringe of the wood became alive with little spurts of flame which flashed redly from all points. I remember how Sedoroff, a recruit of No. I Company (How had he got into our firing-line? flashed through my mind), suddenly sat down, and without saying a word gazed at me with big startled eyes as a little stream of blood commenced to trickle from his mouth. Yes, I remember it well. I remember also how, just as we were on the very edge of the wood, I first saw him in the thick bushes. He was a huge and bulky Turk, but I ran straight at him although I am small and weak. There was a deafening noise; something enormous seemed to flash past me, making my ears ring. He has fired at me, I thought. I remember how with a scream of fear he pressed himself backwards into a thick and prickly bush, although he could easily have gone round it, but he could remember nothing from fright, and strove instead to push his way into its prickly branches.

With a blow I disarmed him, and lunged with my bayonet. There was an indrawn sob and a piteous groan. Then I rushed on. We cheered as we went forward, some falling, some firing. I remember I fired several times. We were already out of the wood into the open. Suddenly the cheers became a long loud roar, and we all rushed forward. That is, the line did, but not I, because I stayed behind. Something strange seemed to have happened, and then, stranger still, everything disappeared, all the cries and firing died away. I could hear nothing, and saw only something blue, which must have been the sky. Then it, too, disappeared.

I was never in such a strange position. I am lying apparently on my stomach, and can see in front of me only a little clod of earth, a few blades of grass, up one of which an ant is climbling head downwards, and some little mounds of dust, last year’s dead grass. This is my whole world, and I can only see with one eye because the other one is being pressed by something hard; it must be the bough against which my head is resting. It is dreadfully awkward, and I absolutely cannot understand why, when I want to, I cannot move. And so the time passes⁠—I hear the chirrup of grasshoppers, the humming of bees⁠—nothing more. At last I make an effort, free my right arm from under my body, and, resting both hands on the ground, I try to kneel.

Something sharp goes like lightning right through my body from my knees to my chest, from my chest up to my head; and again I fall, again darkness, again a blank.

I am awake, but why do I see stars shining brightly in the black-blue of a Bulgarian night? Surely I am in a tent? Then why have I crawled out of it? I make a movement, and feel an excruciating pain in my legs. Ah, now I understand. I have been wounded. Dangerously? I catch hold of my leg where it is hurting. Both right and left legs are covered with clotted blood. When I touch them with my hands the pain is worse. It is like toothache, a throbbing, sickening pain. There is a singing in my ears and my head feels leaden. Vaguely I understand that I have been wounded in both legs. But why have they not picked me up? The Turks cannot have beaten us! I commence, confusedly at first, then more clearly, to remember what happened, and come to the conclusion that we were far from being defeated. Because I fell (this, by the way, I do not remember, but I do remember how they all rushed forward, and that I could not, and saw nothing but blue) on the field on the hill, and that was the field to which our little officer had pointed and said, “Children, we must get there!” So of course we had not been beaten. But why, then, have they not picked me up? Surely here in this field⁠—open ground⁠—everything is visible. Besides which, I cannot be the only one lying here. The firing was too hot. I must turn my head and look. I can do this more easily now, because when I came to my senses and was able to see only grass and that ant climbing with its head downwards I tried to raise myself, and when I fell again it was not into the old position, but on to my back. That is why I can see the stars.

I try to raise myself into a sitting position. It is difficult when both legs are shot through. Several times I almost give it up in despair, but at last, with tears in my eyes from the awful pain, I succeed.

Above me⁠—a scrap of black-blue sky in which a big star is burning and several smaller ones. Around me something dark and tall⁠—bushes! I am amongst the bushes! They have missed me! I feel how the very roots of my hair move as I realize this. But how did I get into the bushes when they hit me in the open? When I was wounded I must have crawled here without remembering it, owing to the pain; only it is odd that now I cannot stir, but then was able to drag myself to these bushes. Perhaps I had only been hit once then, and the second bullet caught me here. There are pinkish stains around me.⁠ ⁠…

The big star has begun to pale, and the smaller stars have disappeared. It is the moon rising. How pretty it must be at home now!⁠ ⁠… Strange noises keep reaching me as if somebody was groaning. Yes, they are groans. Is it somebody else, also forgotten, lying near me with legs shot through or a bullet in his stomach? No, the groans are so close, whilst there is no one, it seems, near me.⁠ ⁠… It cannot be?⁠—yes, it is I who am groaning and making these pitiful noises.⁠ ⁠… Surely it is not so painful really? I suppose it must be, only I do not understand why I am in such pain because my head is leaden and everything seems misty. Better lie down again and sleep, sleep.⁠ ⁠… Only, shall I ever awake again? Anyhow, it does not matter.

Just as I commence to lie down a broad pale gleam of moonlight clearly shows up the place where I am lying, and I see something dark and big on the ground about five paces from me. Something glistens on it in the moonlight. Is it buttons or equipment? Is it a corpse or somebody wounded?

Never mind, I will lie down.⁠ ⁠…

No! impossible! Our men cannot have gone. They are here; they have driven out the Turks and are campnig on the position. Then why no voices? no crackling of campfires? Probably I am so weak I cannot hear. Of course they must be here.

“Help! help! help!”

The wild, maddened, hoarse cries are wrung from me, but there is no answer. Loudly they resound in the night air, but everything else remains silent. Only the grasshoppers keep up their chirruping. The moon is looking down at me with a pitying gaze.

If he was somebody wounded my shouts would have roused him. It is a corpse. One of us or a Turk? But is it not all the same? And sleep is closing my fevered eyelids.

I am lying with closed eyes, although I woke up long ago. I do not want to open them because through the closed lids I can feel the sun, and if I open my eyes the sun will scorch them. Besides, better not to move.⁠ ⁠… Yesterday (I suppose it was yesterday) they wounded me⁠ ⁠… a whole day has gone past, others will pass by, and I shall die. It is all the same. Better not to move. If only I could stop my brain working! But nothing will stop it. Ideas, recollections, thoughts come crowding in. However, all this is not for long, the end will soon come. There will be just a few lines in the newspapers that our losses were insignificant:⁠—wounded⁠ ⁠… so many; killed⁠—one, Private Ivanoff⁠—no, the names of the men are not given, they simply say killed⁠ ⁠… one. One private, as if it were one dog.

All the details of an incident which happened long ago flash to my mind. By the way, how long ago all my life seems⁠—I mean that life when I was not lying here with my legs shot through.⁠ ⁠…

I was going along the street when I was stopped by a crowd which had gathered and was silently gazing at something white covered with blood lying on the roadway whining piteously⁠—a little dog which had been run over by a tramcar. It was dying, as I am now. A dvornik1 pushed his way through the crowd, picked it up by the back of the neck, and carried it away, and the crowd dispersed. Will anyone take me away? No⁠ ⁠… you will lie here and die. And how good is life! How happy I was that day! I went along as if intoxicated. Recollections! do not torture me! Leave me alone with this present torture, then at least I cannot involuntarily make comparisons. Oh, this longing for home! It is worse than wounds.

However, it is getting hot. The sun is scorching me. I open my eyes and see the same bushes, the same sky, only by daylight⁠ ⁠… and there is my neighbour. Yes, he is a Turk, a corpse. What a huge man! I recognize him as the same man I⁠ ⁠…

Before me lies a man whom I have killed. Why did I kill him? He lies there dead and bloodstained. Why did Fate bring him here? Who is he? Perhaps he has⁠ ⁠… as I have⁠ ⁠… an old mother. She will sit long and alone in the evenings at the door of her miserable hut, gazing towards the north, for her darling son, her protector and breadwinner. And I? I also⁠—would that I could change places with him. He is happy. He hears nothing, feels nothing, no pain from wounds, no awful sickness, no thirst⁠ ⁠… the bayonet went straight through his heart. There is a big black hole in his uniform with blood around it. I did that!

I did not want to do it. I wished no one harm when I volunteered. It somehow never entered my mind that I should have to kill people. I only thought of how I would expose my own breast to the bullets. I came⁠ ⁠… and now⁠ ⁠… fool! fool!

And this unhappy fellah (he was in Egyptian uniform)⁠—he is even less to blame than I. First of all they packed him with others like herrings in a barrel on board a steamer and brought him to Constantinople. He had never heard of Russia or Bulgaria. They ordered him to go, and he came. Had he refused they would have beaten him with sticks, or perhaps some Pascha would have put a bullet into him. He came here by long and difficult marches from Stamboul to Rustchuk. We attacked and he defended himself, but seeing that we terrible people cared not for his patent English rifle, but ever leapt forward, he became terror-stricken, and when he wanted to get away, someone, a little man whom he could have killed with one blow of his big black fist, jumped forward and plunged a bayonet into his heart.

Why is he to blame?

And why am I to blame, even though I did kill him? How am I to blame? Why is this thirst torturing me? Thirst! Who knows what this word means! Even when we came through Romania, making forced marches of fifty versts in the terrific heat, even then I did not feel what I feel now. Oh, if only somebody would come along!

God! Yes⁠—there must be something inside that huge water-bottle of his. But I have to get to it. What will it cost me? Never mind, I will get there.

I crawl, dragging my legs behind me. My arms have grown so weak that they can scarcely help me. It is only a few feet, but for me it is more⁠ ⁠… not more, but worse than tens of versts. Nevertheless, I must crawl there. My throat is burning⁠—burning like fire. Yes, no doubt without water you will die sooner, but still perhaps⁠ ⁠…

And I crawl. My legs seem chained to the ground and every movement causes insufferable pain. I yell, yell, but all the same go on crawling. At last! Yes, there is water in the flask, and what a lot! More than half full. It will last me a long time⁠ ⁠… until I die!

You are saving my life, my victim!

I commenced to unfasten the water-bottle, leaning as I did so on one elbow, when, suddenly losing my balance, I fell face forward on to the body of my deliverer. Already it was becoming unpleasant.

I have drunk. The water was warm, but still unspoilt. Moreover, there is plenty. I shall live several days more. I remember having read in a book that a man can live without food for more than a week if only he has water, and in the same book I read an account of a man who committed suicide by starvation, but lived for ages before he died because he drank water.

But what if I do live another five or six days? What will come of it? Our men have gone. The Bulgarians have dispersed. There is no road near. I have to die, only instead of three days’ agony I have given myself a week. Would it not be better to finish it now? Near my neighbour lies his rifle. I need only stretch out my hand⁠—then a flash and the end. There are cartridges lying there. He had no time to use them all. Shall I end it, then?⁠ ⁠… or wait? Which? Deliverance? death? Wait until the Turks come and commence to tear the skin from my wounded legs? Better to finish it myself. No, there is no need to lose heart; I will struggle to the end, to the very last. If they find me I am saved. Perhaps the bones are not touched, they will cure me. I shall see home⁠—mother⁠—and Masha.⁠ ⁠… Oh merciful God! grant that they may never know the whole truth! Let them believe I was killed outright. What if they find out that I suffered for two, three, four days!

My head is spinning round, my journey to my neighbour has completely exhausted me. And this awful smell. How black he has become! What will he be like tomorrow or the day after? I am lying here now only because I have no strength left to drag myself away. I will rest a little and then crawl back to the old place; the wind, too, is blowing from there, and will carry this smell away from me.

I am lying absolutely worn out. The sun is burning my face and hands. There is no shelter. If only night (the second, I suppose) would come more quickly!

My thoughts are getting confused, and I am losing consciousness.

I must have had a long sleep, because when I awoke it was already night. All is as before, my wounds ache as before, and he is lying there as before, just as large and motionless as before.

I cannot help thinking of him. Surely it was not only that he should cease to live that I gave up all⁠—that I have starved, have been frozen by the cold, tormented by the heat, and finally am lying here in this agony? Have I done anything of any use to my country except this murder?

Murder! murderer!⁠—Who? I!

When I was fascinated by the idea of going to the war, mother and Masha did not try to dissuade me, although they both cried bitterly. Blinded by the idea, I did not see those tears. I did not understand (now I do) what I was causing to those near me. But why think of it? It will not recall the past. And in what a strange light my action appeared to many of my friends⁠—“Well, madman! interfering without knowing why!” How could they say this? How can they reconcile such words with their ideas of heroism, patriotism, etc.? Surely in their eyes I represented all those virtues? And yet I am a “madman and monster”!

And so I go to Kishineff. There they load me up with a knapsack and all sorts of military paraphernalia. And I go with thousands, of whom some, like myself, are going voluntarily. The remainder would stay at home if allowed. However, they too, like us, will march thousands of versts and will fight also like us, or even better. They will do their duty notwithstanding that, if allowed, they would immediately give it up and go home.

A chilling early morning breeze has arisen. The bushes are moving, and a bird is sleepily fluttering its wings. The stars have faded away. The black-blue of the heavens has taken a greyish hue, and is covered with soft, feathery clouds. A raw half-mist is rising from the ground. The third day has arrived of my⁠—what can I call it? Life? Agony? The third.⁠ ⁠… How many still remain? In any case not many. I have become very weak, and apparently cannot even get away from my neighbour. Before long I shall be like him, and then we will not be so unpleasing to each other.

I must have a drink. I will drink three times a day: in the morning, at midday, and in the evening.

The sun has risen. His huge disc, crimson as blood, is intersected by the black branches of the bushes. It looks as if it will be hot today. My neighbour! what will you look like after this day is over? Even now you are awful. Yes, he is awful. His hair has commenced to fall out. His skin, originally black, has become a greyish-yellow. His swollen face has become so tightly stretched that the skin has burst behind one ear. Large blisters like bladders have pushed their way out between the buttons which fasten the leggings around his swollen legs. And he himself looks a veritable mountain. What will the sun do to him today?

To lie so near is unbearable. I must crawl away from him at all costs. But can I? I can still raise my arm, open the water-bottle, and drink, but to move my own heavy helpless body? Nevertheless, I will move even if a little way only, if only half a pace an hour.

I have spent the whole morning moving. The pain was awful, but what is that to me now? I no longer remember, I cannot imagine what it feels like to be sound and well. I am accustomed to pain now. I have succeeded this morning in crawling back to my old place. But I have not enjoyed the fresh air for long⁠—that is, if there can be fresh air within six paces of a putrefying corpse. The wind has changed. It is so appalling that I am sick. The convulsions of an empty stomach cause me new tortures, and my whole inside seems to become twisted. But the awful poisoned air still fans me. In my despair I burst out crying.

Absolutely worn out, I lie in a semi-stupor.⁠ ⁠… Suddenly⁠—Is this the fantasy of a disordered imagination? It seems to me that⁠ ⁠… no⁠ ⁠… yes it is⁠ ⁠… voices! The sound of horses’ hoofs and human voices. I almost cried out, but just stopped myself. And what if they are Turks? What then? Then to my present tortures will be added others far more awful, even to read of which in the newspapers makes one’s hair stand on end. They will flay me alive and roast my wounded legs. It will be well if they do no more than this, for they have great inventive powers. Is it really better to end life in their hands than to die here? But if they are some of ours? You cursed bushes! Why have you surrounded me with so thick a hedge? I can see nothing through them. In one place only is there an opening like a little window between the branches which gives me a view away on to the open ground. Yes, there is the small stream from which we drank before the fight. And there is the huge block of sandstone like a little bridge across the stream. They are sure to come across it. The voices die away, I cannot hear what language they are speaking, even my hearing has become weak. My God! if they are ours⁠—I will call to them. They should hear me even from there. It is better than risking falling into the clutches of Bashi-Bazouks. Why are they so long in coming? In the torments of expectancy I do not even notice the dreadful air, although it has in no way improved.

Then suddenly Cossacks appear crossing the stream. Blue uniforms, red-striped trousers, lances all. A half sotnia2 of them, and in front, on a magnificent horse, is a black-bearded officer. As soon as they are across the stream he turns in his saddle and gives the order, “Tro⁠—t, march!”

“Stop! stop! For God’s sake! Help! help!⁠—Comrades!” I cry, but the trotting horses, rattling scabbards, and loud talking of the Cossacks drown my hoarse cries⁠—and they do not hear me!

Oh, curses on it! Exhausted, I fall face forward on to the ground, and cry in convulsive sobs. The water, my salvation and my insurance against death, is pouring out from the flask, which I have overturned, but it is only when barely half a glassful remains and the rest is soaking into the dry thirsty soil that I notice that in my fall I had knocked over the water-bottle.

Shall I ever forget the awfulness of that moment, the numbness which came over me? I lay motionless with half-closed eyes. The wind kept constantly changing, and blew alternately fresh and clean or almost overpowered me. My neighbour had become too dreadful for words. Once when I opened my eyes to snatch a glance at him I was appalled. There was no longer a face. It had fallen away from the bone. The horrible grinning skull with its everlasting smile appeared too revolting, although (as a medical student) I have frequently handled them, but this corpse in uniform with its bright buttons made me shudder. “And this is war!” I reflected. “This corpse is its symbol!”

The sun is scorching and baking me as usual. My hands and face have long been all blisters. I have drunk all the water that was left. My thirst was so maddening that I decided to take just a sip, but swallowed all that was left at one gulp. Oh, why did I not call to the Cossacks when they were close to me? Even had they been Turks it would have been better. They would have tortured me for perhaps two or even three hours, but now I do not know how long I shall have to writhe and suffer here. Mother, darling mother, you would tear out your grey hair, you would beat your head against a wall and curse the day you bore me⁠ ⁠… you would curse the world which has invented war for the torturing of men did you but know. Goodbye, mother dearest, and farewell, my sweetheart, Masha, my love. How, how bitter!

Again I see that little dog. The dvornik did not pity it, but knocked its head against the wall, and threw it (though still living) into a refuse pit in the courtyard of the house near by, where it lingered for a day. But I⁠ ⁠… I am more unfortunate because I have already suffered three days. Tomorrow will be the fourth day⁠—then there will be a fifth, sixth.

Death, where art thou? Come! Take me!

But death does not come and does not take me. And I lie here under this awful sun, with not a drop of water to cool my burning throat and a corpse which is poisoning me. It has become quite decomposed, and is a seething mass. When nothing but the bones and uniform are left it will be my turn. I shall be like that.

The day passes and the night passes. No change. Another morn is arriving just the same, and yet another day will pass.

The rustling bushes seem to be murmuring, and whisper, “You will die! You will die! You will die!” “You will not see! You will not see! You will not see!” answer the bushes from the other side.

“No, you will not see them,” says a loud voice near me. I give a shudder and at once come to myself. From out of the bushes the kindly blue eyes of Yakoff, our corporal, are looking at me.

“Spades here!” he cries. “Here are two more of theirs.”

No spades are wanted, no need to bury me. I am alive⁠—I try to cry out, but only a feeble groan comes from my parched lips.

“Merciful God! Alive! It is our Ivanoff; he is alive! Come here, mates, our barin is alive! Call the doctor!” In a few moments they are rinsing my mouth with water, brandy and something. Then everything disappears.

The stretcher-bearers move with a gentle and measured swing which lulls me to rest. I awake, then lapse again into oblivion. My bandaged wounds are not hurting, and an inexpressible joyous feeling of comfort pervades my whole being.

“… Ha⁠—alt! Low⁠—er!” and the “relief” take the place of their comrades in carrying the stretcher.

The N.C.O. in charge is Peter Ivanovich, a corporal of our company, and a tall, lanky, but very good fellow. He is so tall that looking towards him I gradually descry his head and shoulders and his long straggly beard, although four stalwart men are carrying the stretcher shoulder high.

“Peter Ivanovich,” I whisper.

“What is it, old friend?” and Peter Ivanovich bends over me.

“Peter Ivanovich, what did the doctor say to you? Shall I die soon?”

“But, Ivanoff, what are you talking about? Of course you will not die; no bones have been broken. My word, but you are lucky. Not a bone or an artery touched. But how have you lived these three and a half days? What had you to eat?”

“Nothing.”

“And to drink?”

“I took the Turk’s water-bottle. Peter Ivanovich, I cannot talk now⁠—afterwards.”

“All right, chum. Try and sleep now.”

Again sleep⁠—oblivion.⁠ ⁠…

When I awake again it is to find myself in the Divisional Hospital tent. Around me stand nurses and doctors, one of whom I recognize as a well-known St. Petersburg professor. He is leaning over me, his hands are bathed in blood. He does not examine my legs long, and turning towards me, he says: “God has been kind to you, young man. You will live. We have had to take one leg from you, but⁠ ⁠… well, that is nothing. Can you talk?” I am able to talk, and I tell him all that I have written here.

An Incident

A Very Short Romance

Frost and cold. January is approaching, and is making its coming known to every unfortunate being⁠—dvorniks and gorodovois⁠—unable to hide their noses in some warm place. It is also letting me know. Not because I have been unable to find a warm corner, but through a whim of mine.

As a matter of fact, why am I stumping along this deserted quay? The lamps are shining brightly, although the wind keeps forcing its way inside them and making the gas-jets dance. Their bright light makes the dark mass of the sumptuous Palace, and especially its windows, look all the more gloomy. The wind is moaning and howling across the icy waste of the Neva. Through the gusts of wind comes the sound of the chimes of the Fortress Cathedral, and every stroke of the mournful bells keeps time with the tap of my wooden leg on the ice-covered granite slabs of the pavement and with the beating of my aching heart against the walls of its narrow cell.

I must present myself to the reader. I am a young man with a wooden leg. Perhaps you will say I am imitating Dickens. You remember Silas Wegg, the literary gent with the wooden leg (in Our Mutual Friend)? No, I am not copying him. I really am a young man with a wooden leg. Only I have become so recently.

“Ding-dong, ding-dong!” The chimes again ring out their doleful chant, and then one o’clock strikes. Only one o’clock! Still seven hours before daylight, then this black winter night, with its cold, wet snow, will give place to a grey day. Shall I go home? I do not know. It is absolutely all the same to me. I have no need of sleep.

In the spring, also, I loved to spend whole nights walking up and down this quay. Ah, what nights those are! What can surpass them? They are not the scented nights of the South, with their strange black heaven and big stars with their pursuing gaze. Here all is light and bright. The sky with its varied hues is coldly beautiful, and throughout the night remains gilded north and east with the rays of a scarce-setting sun. The air is fresh and keen. The limpid Neva rolls onwards proudly, its dancing wavelets contentedly lapping against the stonework of the quay. I am standing on this quay, and on my arm a young girl is leaning. And this girl⁠—

Ah, good people! why have I begun to tell you of my wounds? But such is the stupidity of the poor human heart. When it is stricken it dreams of seeking relief from each it meets, and does not find it. This is, however, quite intelligible. Who is in want of an old undarned stocking? Everyone endeavours to throw it away⁠—the farther the better.

My heart was in no need of mending when in the spring of this year I met Masha⁠—the best of all Mashas in this world. I met her on this same quay, which was not, however, as cold as it is now. And I had a real leg instead of this disgusting wooden stump⁠—a real well-made leg, like the one that I have left me. Taking me all round, I was a well-made fellow, and, of course, did not walk, as now, like some bandy-legged fool. Not a nice word to use, but at present I cannot pick my words. And so I met her. It happened quite simply. I was walking along; she was walking along. (I am not a Lothario, or rather was not, because now I have a wooden stump.)

I do not know what impelled me to do so, but I spoke. First of all I, of course, told her I was not one of those sort of blackguards, etc., then I declared my intentions were honourable, and so on. My face (on which there is now a deep furrow above the bridge of my nose (a very gloomy-looking furrow)) calmed her fears, and we walked together as far as her home. She was returning from her old grandmother, to whom she used to read. The poor old lady was blind.

Now the grandmother is dead. This year many have died, and not only old grandmothers. I could have died very easily, I assure you. But I have not. Oh, how much trouble can a man stand? You do not know, and neither do I.

Very well, Masha ordered me to be a hero, and therefore I had to join the army.

The times of the Crusades have passed, and knights are extinct; but if she whom you love were to say to you, “I am this ring,” and throw it into a fire, even were it the greatest possible conflagration, would you not throw yourself into the flames to get that ring? Oh, what a quaint fellow! “Of course not,” you reply⁠—“of course not. I should go to the best jeweller and buy her another ring ten times more valuable.” And she would say: “This is not the same ring, but is it an expensive ring? I will never believe you.” However, I am not of the same opinion as you, gentle reader. Perhaps the woman who would appeal to you would act in that way. You, no doubt, are the proud possessor of many shares and stocks, and can gratify any wish. You perhaps even subscribe to a foreign journal for your amusement. Perhaps you remember as a child having watched a moth which had flown into a flame? That also amused you in those days. The moth lay on its back quivering and fluttering its little striped wings. This interested you; then, when it no longer amused you, you squashed it with your linger, and the unhappy little thing ceased to suffer. Ah, kind reader, if only you would squash me with your finger, so that I might cease to suffer!

She was a strange girl. When war was declared she went about dreamily, and without speaking, for several days, and nothing I did would amuse her. “Listen,” she said to me at length, “you are an honourable man?”

“I may admit that,” I replied.

“Honourable people prove their words by deeds. You were for the war; you must fight.” She puckered her brows and warmly pressed her little hand into mine.

I looked at Masha, and said seriously: “Yes.”

“When you return I will be your wife,” she said to me on the station platform. “Come back!” Tears dimmed my sight, and I almost sobbed aloud. But I kept my self-control, and found strength to answer Masha:

“Remember, Masha, honourable people⁠—”

“Prove their words by deeds,” said she, finishing the sentence. I clasped her to my heart for the last time, and jumped into the railway-carriage.

I went to fight for Masha’s sake, but I did my duty by my country honourably. I marched bravely through Romania amidst rain and dust, heat and cold. Self-sacrificingly I gnawed the ration biscuit. When we first met the Turks I did not fail, but won the “Cross” and promotion as N.C.O. In the second action something happened, and I fell to the ground. Groans, mist; a doctor in white apron with blood-covered hands; hospital nurses; my leg, with its birthmark, taken off below the knee. All this happened as in a dream. Then the ambulance-train, with its comfortable cots and dainty lady in charge, brought me to St. Petersburg.

When you leave a town in the usual and proper way with two legs, and return to it with one leg and a stump instead of the other⁠—believe me, it costs something.

They placed me in a hospital. This was in July. I begged them to find out the address of Mary Ivanovna and the good-natured attendant brought it me.

I wrote, then again, and a third time⁠—but no answer. My kind reader, I have told you all this, and, of course, you do not believe me. What an unlikely story! you say. A certain knight and a certain crafty traitress⁠—the old, old story. My intelligent reader, believe me there are many such knights besides myself.

Eventually they fitted me with a wooden leg, and I was able now to find out for myself the cause of Masha’s silence. I drove to her house, and then stumped up the long staircase. How I had flown up it eight months ago! At last the door. I ring with a sinking at my heart. I hear footsteps, and the old servant opens the door to me. Without listening to her joyous exclamations I rush (if it is possible to rush when your legs are of different kinds) into the drawing-room. Masha!

She is not alone, but is sitting with a very nice young fellow, a distant relative, who was at the University with me, and was expecting to obtain a good appointment eventually. Both congratulated me very tenderly (probably owing to my wooden leg), but both were somewhat confused. Within a quarter of an hour I understood all.

I did not wish to stand in the way of their happiness. The intelligent reader smiles sceptically. Surely you do not want me to believe all this? Who would gratuitously surrender the girl he loves to any good-for-nothing fellow?

First, he is not a good-for-nothing fellow; and, second⁠—well, I would tell you that second only you would not understand, because you do not believe that virtue and justice exist nowadays. You would prefer the unhappiness of three persons to the misery of one. You do not believe me, intelligent reader? Then don’t!

The wedding took place two days ago, and I was best man. I performed my duties at the ceremony with dignity, and gave to another what I most prize in this world. Masha from time to time glanced timidly at me, and her husband regarded me with a perplexed air of bewilderment. The wedding was a merry one. Champagne flowed, her German relatives cried “Hoch!” and called me “der Russische Held.” Masha and her husband were Lutherans.

“Aha!” exclaims the intelligent reader; “see how you have betrayed yourself, sir hero! Why must you make use of the Lutheran religion? Simply because there are no orthodox marriages in December! That is the whole reason and explanation, and the whole narrative is pure invention.”

Think what you like, dear reader. It is a matter of absolute indifference to me. But were you to come with me on these December nights along the Palace Quay, and listen to the storm and chimes, and the tap of my wooden leg on the pavement; if you could feel what effect these winter nights have on me; if you could believe⁠—

“Ding-dong, ding-dong!” The chimes are sounding four o’clock. It is time to go home, and throw myself on to my lonely bed and sleep.

“Au revoir,” reader!

The Meeting

A broad, trembling silvery band of moonlight stretched away for tens of versts. The remaining expanse of the sea was black, and the regular dull noise of the waves as they broke and rolled along the sandy shore reached the person standing on the cliff high above. Even more black than the sea itself were the gently rocking silhouettes of the vessels in the roadstead. One huge steamer (“Probably English,” reflected Vassili Petrovich), within this bright strip of moonlight, was noisily blowing off steam in a series of small clouds, which dissolved as they lightly rose into the air. A moist, brine-laden breeze was coming from the sea. Vassili Petrovich, who had seen nothing of this kind previously, gazed rapturously at the sea, the moonlit strip, the steamers and sailing vessels, and, for the first time in his life, with a feeling of pleasure inhaled the sea air. He long gave himself up to the delights of this new sensation, turning his back on the town to which he had only this day come, and in which he was to spend many, many years. Behind him a heterogeneous crowd were promenading along the boulevard, whence could be heard scraps of Russian and other languages, the decorous, subdued conversation of local dignitaries mingling with the chatter of young girls, and the loud, merry voices of grownup schoolboys, as they strolled past together in knots of twos and threes. A burst of laughter from one of these groups made Vassili Petrovich turn round. As it passed him, one of the youths was saying something to a young girl, whilst his comrades noisily interrupted his passionate and apparently apologetic speech.

“Don’t believe him, Nina Petrovna! It is all lies! He is making it up!”

“But truly, Nina Petrovna, I am not in the least to blame.”

“If you, Shevyreft, ever again dream of deceiving me⁠ ⁠…” said the girl stiffly, in a quiet young voice.

Vassili Petrovich lost the rest of the sentence as the speakers passed out of hearing. But a second later a further burst of laughter resounded in the darkness.

“This is the field of my future labours, in which, as the ‘modest ploughman, I shall work,’ ” mused Vassili Petrovich, first because he had been appointed teacher in the local gymnasium, and secondly, because he was fond of figurative forms of thought, even when not expressed aloud.

“Yes, I must perforce toil in this modest field,” he reflected, sitting down on a bench with his face to the sea. “Where are the dreams of a professorship, of being a publicist, of a great name? You haven’t it in you, friend Vassili Petrovich, to carry out all these fine plans. We’ll try work here.”

And beautiful and pleasant thoughts passed through the brain of the new schoolteacher. He thought of how he would discover the “spark divine” in the boys. How he would help those natures “striving to divest themselves of the chains of darkness.” How, finally, his pupils in due course would become men of note.⁠ ⁠… In his imagination he even pictured himself, Vassili Petrovich, sitting, an old, grey-haired teacher, in his modest lodging, and being visited by his former scholars⁠—one a professor of such and such a University, a man of renown in Russia and in Europe; another, an author, a well-known novelist; a third, a statesman also famous⁠—all of them treating him with respect. “It is the good seed sown by you, dear sir, when I was a boy, that has made me the man I am,” the statesman would say to Vassili Petrovich, warmly pressing the hand of his old tutor.

However, Vassili Petrovich did not long occupy himself with such exalted reflections. His thoughts soon turned to matters directly concerning his present situation. He drew a new pocketbook from his pocket, and counting over his money, commenced to calculate as to how much would remain after payment of all necessary expenses. “What a pity I was so extravagant en route!” thought he. “Lodgings⁠ ⁠… we’ll say twenty roubles a month, board, washing, tea, tobacco.⁠ ⁠… I shall save a thousand roubles in six months, anyhow. I am sure to be able to get lessons here at four, or even five, roubles each.⁠ ⁠…” A feeling of satisfaction took him, and he became possessed of a desire to feel in his pocket where two letters of recommendation to local “bigwigs” lay, and for the twentieth time to read their addresses. He pulled out the letters, carefully unfolded the paper in which they were wrapped, but was unable to read the addresses as the moonlight was not bright enough to admit of such satisfaction. A photograph was wrapped up with the letters. Vassili Petrovich turned it straight to the light of the moon, and endeavoured to look at the well-known features. “Oh, my darling Lise!” he murmured almost out loud, and sighed, not without a feeling of pleasure. Lisa was his fiancée, whom he had left behind in Petersburg, waiting until Vassili Petrovich should accumulate the thousand roubles which the young couple deemed necessary before setting up house.

Heaving a sigh, he hid the photograph and letters in the left side-pocket of his coat, and commenced to dream of his future married life. And these dreams were even more pleasurable than those about the statesman who was to come and thank him for the good seed sown in his heart.

The sea fumed far away below him and the wind became fresher. The English steamer had disappeared from the strip of moonlight which was shining with a brilliancy melting into a thousand shimmering soft lights, and stretching far away over a seemingly endless expanse of water. Vassili Petrovich was loath to rise from his seat, to tear himself away from this picture and to return to the stifling atmosphere of the little room in the hotel at which he was stopping. However, it was now late, so he got up and went along the boulevard.

A gentleman in a light suit of greyish alpaca and a straw hat with a muslin pugaree (the summer costume of the local beaux), rose from a bench as Vassili Petrovich passed, and said:

“Can you give me a light?”

“With pleasure,” replied Vassili Petrovich.

The red glow of the flame lit up a familiar face.

“Nicolai, my good chap. Is it you?”

“Vassili Petrovich?”

“The same.⁠ ⁠… Ah, how glad I am! I never thought of this, never dreamt of it!” said Vassili Petrovich, embracing his friend heartily. “What fate has brought you here?”

“That’s simply explained⁠—my work. And you?”

“I have been sent here as teacher in the gymnasium. I have only just arrived.”

“Where are you staying? If at an hotel, come along with me. I am glad to see you. You can scarcely have any acquaintances here? Come with me, we will have some supper and talk over old times.”

“Yes, let us,” assented Vassili Petrovich. “I shall be delighted. I came here as if into a wilderness⁠—and suddenly this happy meeting. ‘Izvoschik!’ ” he called.

“Don’t; there is no need to call an izvoschik,” said Vassili’s friend, as he in turn called out “Sergei,” and a smartly turned out koliaska drove up to the kerb. The friend jumped in, but Vassili Petrovich remained standing on the pavement, and looked with bewilderment at the carriage, the black horses, and the portly coachman.

“Kudriasheff, are the horses yours?”

“Mine, mine. What? You didn’t expect it?”

“Wonderful.⁠ ⁠… Can it be you?”

“Well, who else if not me? But get in, and we will talk afterwards.”

Vassili Petrovich got in, sat himself by the side of Kudriasheff, and the koliaska rolled over the cobbles. Vassili Petrovich, as he sat comfortably on the soft cushions, smiled. “What does it mean?” he thought. “Not long ago Kudriasheff was the poorest of students, and now⁠—a koliaska!” Kudriasheff, stretching out his legs, placed them on the seat opposite, said nothing, but smoked his cigar. In five minutes’ time the carriage stopped.

“Well, friend, we have arrived. I will show you my humble abode,” said Kudriasheff, stepping down and helping Vassili Petrovich to get out of the carriage.

Before entering his “humble abode,” the guest cast a glance at it. The moon was behind it, and did not light it up, so that he was only able to note that the “abode” was a one-storied building with some ten or twelve large windows. A portico with spiral columns picked out with gold hung over a heavy wooden door, in which was inserted a looking-glass. The handle was of bronze in the form of a bird’s claw, which held an irregularly shaped piece of crystal. And a shining brass plate, bearing the owner’s name, was affixed to the door.

“Your ‘humble abode,’ Kudriasheff! It is a palace,” said Vassili Petrovich, as they entered the hall with its oak furniture and polished black fireplace. “Is it really your own?”

“No, my dear chap, I haven’t got to that yet. I rent it. It is not expensive⁠—one thousand five hundred roubles.”

“One thousand five hundred roubles!” gasped Vassili Petrovich.

“It is better to pay one thousand five hundred roubles than to spend capital which will give far higher interest if not converted into real estate. Yes, and it means a lot of money if you really build, not like this trash.”

“Trash!” exclaimed Vassili Petrovich perplexedly.

“Yes, the house is nothing grand. But come along.⁠ ⁠…”

Vassili Petrovich hurriedly took off his overcoat and followed his host. The general style in which the house was furnished gave him fresh food for amazement. A whole series of lofty rooms with parquet floors and expensive wallpapers with patterns of gold. The dining-room was furnished in oak with crude models of birds hanging on the wall, an enormous carved sideboard, and a large round dining-table, which was flooded with light thrown from a hanging bronze lamp ornamented with a dead white shade. In the lounge there was a grand piano, a quantity of furniture of all kinds⁠—sofas, stools, chairs, etc. Expensive prints and villainous oleographs hung on the walls in gilded frames. The drawing-room had the customary silk upholstered furniture, and was crowded with numberless unnecessary things. It gave the impression that the owner had suddenly become wealthy⁠—had won two hundred or three hundred thousand roubles⁠—and had hurriedly furnished his house on a lavish scale. All had been purchased at one time, and purchased not because it was wanted, but because the money was burning his pocket, and found an outlet in the purchase of a grand piano, on which, so far as Vassili Petrovich knew, Kudriasheff could only play with one finger; of the horrible old painting to which probably none paid the slightest attention⁠—one of the tens of thousands which are attributed to some second-class Flemish master; of chessmen of Chinese work, so fine and ethereal that it was impossible to play with them, and on the heads of each of which were carved three balls, and of scores of other unnecessary articles.

The friends went into the study. Here it was more comfortable. A large writing-table, equipped with various bronze and china knickknacks, and littered with papers, plans, and drawing implements, occupied the middle of the room. Huge coloured plans and geographical charts hung on the walls, and below them stood two low Turkish divans with silk cushions. Kudriasheff, taking Vassili Petrovich by the waist, led him straight to a divan, and sat him on the soft pillows.

“Well, I am very glad to meet an old comrade,” said he.

“And I also.⁠ ⁠… Do you know what⁠—to arrive here as if in a wilderness, and suddenly to meet⁠ ⁠… Do you know, Nicolai Constantinovich, meeting you has so stirred my mind, has raised so many recollections⁠ ⁠…”

“Of what?”

“How of what? Of our student days, of the time when we lived so well, if not in a material sense, at least morally speaking.⁠ ⁠… Do you remember⁠ ⁠…”

“Remember what? How you and I used to devour sausages made of dog? Enough, my friend; it bores me. Will you have a cigar? ‘Regalia Imperiala,’ or some such name⁠—I forget what. I only know that they cost a poltinik each.”

Vassili Petrovich took one of the proffered treasures, took a penknife out of his pocket, cut the end off, lit the cigar, and said:

“Nicolai Constantinovich, I feel absolutely in a dream. A few years⁠—and you have got to such a position!”

“What position? It’s worth nothing.”

“But why? How much do you get?”

“What? Salary?”

“Yes, pay.”

“As engineer and Provincial Secretary Kudriasheff (2nd) I receive a salary of one thousand six hundred roubles a year.”

Vassili Petrovich’s eyes dilated.

“But how⁠ ⁠… Where does all this come from?”

“Oh, my friend, what simplicity! Where? Out of water and earth, sea and dry land. But chiefly from here.”

And he tapped his forehead with his finger.

“Do you see those drawings hanging on the walls?”

“I see them,” replied Vassili Petrovich, “and⁠—”

“Do you know what they are?”

“No, I don’t,” and Vassili Petrovich got up from the divan and went up to the wall. The blue, red, brown and black shades conveyed nothing to him, any more than the mysterious figures above the fine lines, drawn in red ink.

“Plans, of course they are plans; but of what?”

“Really, I don’t know.”

“These plans represent, my very dear Vassili Petrovich, a future mole. Do you know what a mole is?”

“Well, of course. You must remember I am a teacher of the Russian language. A mole is⁠—well, a dam. What?”

“Precisely, a dam. A dam for the formation of an artificial harbour. On these drawings is the plan of the mole which we are now constructing. You saw the sea from above where you were standing?”

“Certainly. A wonderful picture! But I did not notice any kind of construction.”

“It is difficult to notice it,” said Kudriasheff, laughing. “Scarcely any of this mole, Vassili Petrovich, is in the sea. It is almost all here on dry land.”

“Where?”

“Where, here in this house, and at the houses of the other engineers⁠—Knobloch, Puitsikovsky, etc. This is, of course, between ourselves. I am talking to you as an old friend. Why are you staring at me in that way? It is a common occurrence.”

“But really, this is awful! Surely you are not telling the truth? Are you really not above such unclean methods for obtaining this comfort? Has the past only resulted in bringing you to this⁠ ⁠… this? And you talk quite calmly of this⁠ ⁠…”

“Stop, stop, Vassili Petrovich! No strong words, if you please. You talk of ‘dishonourable methods’? Tell me first what is meant by honourable and dishonourable. I myself do not know. Perhaps I have forgotten, but I didn’t try to remember, and it seems to me you yourself do not remember, only pretend you do. But let us drop the subject. First of all, it is not polite. Respect freedom of judgment. You talk of⁠—dishonour. Talk if you like, but don’t swear at me. I do not swear at you because your opinions differ from mine. The whole matter, my dear friend, lies in the view, the point of view, and as there are many points of view, let us drop this matter and go to the dining-room, where we will have some ‘vodka,’ and talk on pleasanter subjects.”

“But, Nicolai, Nicolai, it hurts me to look at you.”

“Well, let it hurt as much as you like. Let it hurt. It will pass away. You will grow accustomed to it. You will look at it and will say, ‘What a simpleton I am!’ Yes, you will say it, remember my words! Come along, let us go and have a drink and forget about erring engineers. That’s why a man has brains, in order to go astray.⁠ ⁠… Well, my dear tutor, how much are you going to get?”

“It is all the same to you.”

“Well, for instance?”

“Well, I earn three thousand roubles with private lessons.”

“There you are! For a paltry three thousand to drag out your whole life in giving lessons! And I sit here and look around. If I wish⁠—I drink. If I don’t wish, I don’t. If the fancy came into my head to spit at the ceiling all day long, I could afford to do it. And money⁠—so much money that it⁠—‘is dross for us.’ ”

When they went into the dining-room, they found everything ready for supper. The cold roast beef looked like a rosy mountain. There were pots of jam displaying a variety of English names and labels. A whole row of bottles raised their heads from the table. The friends drank a wineglass or so of vodka each, and consumed their supper. Kudriasheff ate slowly and with relish. He was absolutely absorbed in his occupation.

Vassili Petrovich ate and thought, thought and ate. He was greatly perplexed, and could not make up his mind what to do. Acting on his principles, he ought at once to leave his old friend’s house and never look at it again. “All this is really stolen,” he reflected, as he placed a piece of meat in his mouth, and sipped the wine poured out by his host; “and is it not disgraceful of me to be here eating and drinking it?” Many such thoughts passed through the brain of the poor teacher, but they remained thoughts, and behind them hid a certain secret voice which annexed each thought by “Well, and what then?” and Vassili Petrovich felt that he was not able to decide this question, and remained seated. “Well, I will watch,” flashed through his brain in self-justification, followed by a sense of confusion mingled with shame. “Why should I observe? Am I a writer or what?”

“Ah, what meat!” commenced Kudriasheff. “Take note of it; you will not get anything like it throughout the town.” And he related to Vassili Petrovich a long story of how he had dined at Knoblochs’, and had been astonished by the beef there, and how he had found out where it could be got, and had eventually succeeded in getting it. “You have come just in the nick of time,” he said, by way of conclusion of his story about the meat. “Have you ever eaten anything approaching it?”

“It is certainly excellent beef,” replied Vassili Petrovich.

“Magnificent, my dear chap! I like everything to be as it ought to be. But why aren’t you drinking? Wait a moment, I will pour you out some wine.”

An equally long story of the wine followed, in which there figured an English ship’s captain, a commercial house in London, and the same Knobloch and the Customs. As he talked about his wine, Kudriasheff drank it, and as he drank he became more excited. Bright spots appeared on his pallid cheeks, and his speech became more rapid and vehement.

“But why are you so silent?” asked he of Vassili Petrovich, who, as a matter of fact, had preserved a stubborn silence whilst listening to the panegyrics on meat, wine, cheese, and the other delicacies adorning the engineer’s table.

“My dear fellow, I don’t want to talk.”

“Not want to? Bosh! I see you are still thinking about my confession. I am sorry, very sorry, I told you anything about it. We should have supped together with the greatest satisfaction but for this infernal dam.⁠ ⁠… Better not to think about it, Vassili Petrovich⁠—put it aside⁠ ⁠… eh? Vassenka, have done with it! What is to be done, old chap? I have not realized your hopes. Life is not a school. Yes, and I don’t know whether you will stick to your path long.”

“I beg you not to make conjectures about me,” said Vassili Petrovich.

“Offended?⁠ ⁠… Of course, you won’t stick to it. What has your disinterestedness given you? Are you really contented now? Do you really never think every day as to whether your acts are in keeping with your ideals, and are you not convinced every day that they are not? Am I not right, eh? But drink, it is good wine.”

He poured himself out a glassful, held it up to the light, sipped it, smacked his lips, and drank it.

“Look here, my dear friend, do you think that I do not know what you are thinking of at the present moment? I know exactly. ‘Why,’ you are thinking, ‘am I sitting here with this man? Is he necessary to me? Can I really not get on without his wine and cigars?’ Listen⁠—listen, let me finish. I do not for one moment imagine that you are sitting here only for my wine and cigars. Not at all. Even if you were in great need of them, you would not sponge on me. Sponging is a very burdensome thing. You are sitting here and talking with me simply because you cannot make up your mind as to whether or not I am really a criminal. Do I not disturb you, and that’s all? Of course, it is very offensive to you, because you have certain convictions divided up under various headings in your head, and under them, I, your former comrade and friend, appear a scoundrel. At the same time you cannot feel any hostility towards me. Convictions are convictions, but I by myself am your comrade, and I may even say a good chap. You know yourself that I am incapable of offending anyone.⁠ ⁠…”

“Wait a moment, Kudriasheff. Where have you got all this from? You yourself say it is not yours.” Vassili Petrovich waved his hand. “The person from whom you have stolen is the offended party.”

“It is easy to talk about the person from whom I have stolen. I think, and think, as to whom I have offended, but I cannot understand whom. You do not understand how this business is arranged. I will tell you, and then perhaps you will agree with me, that it is not so easy to find the offended party.”

Kudriasheff rang, and the stolid figure of a manservant appeared.

“Ivan Pavlich, bring me the drawing out of the study. It is hanging between the windows. You will see, Vassili Petrovich, what a gigantic business it is. I really have even begun to find poetry in it.”

Ivan Pavlich carefully brought an enormous sheet gummed on calico. Kudriasheff took it, pushed away the plates, bottles, and glasses near him, and spread out his drawing on the tablecloth, stained in places with red wine.

“Look here,” he said. “This is a sectional drawing of our mole, and this is a longitudinal section. Do you see the part painted blue? That is the sea. The depth here is so great that it is impossible to build up from the bottom, so we are first of all preparing a bed for the mole.”

“A bed?” asked Vassili Petrovich. “What a strange name!”

“A stone bed of enormous blocks of stone, each of which is not less than one cubic foot in size.” Kudriasheff detached from his watch-chain a pair of miniature silver compasses, and took a little line by them on the drawing. “See, Vassili Petrovich, this is a sajene. If we measure the bed transversely, it will show a width of not less than fifty sajenes. Not what you would call a narrow bed, eh? A mass of stone of this width is being raised from the bottom of the sea to within sixteen feet of the surface. If you picture to yourself the width of this bed and its enormous length, you will get some idea of the size of this mass of stone. Sometimes, do you know, for a whole day barge after barge will come to the mole and throw out its load, but when you measure, the increase is infinitesimal. The stones just seem to fall into a bottomless pit.⁠ ⁠… The bed is painted here on the plan a dirty grey colour. They are making progress with it, but from the shore other work is already commencing on it. Steam cranes are lowering on to this bed huge artificial stones, cubic-shaped blocks made of cobbles and cement, each of which is a cubic sajene in size, and weighs many hundreds of poods. The crane raises them, turns, and places them in rows. It is a strange sensation when you realize that with a slight pressure of the hand you can make this mass rise and lower at will. When such a mass obeys you, you are conscious of the might of man.⁠ ⁠… Do you see⁠—here they are, these cubes.” He pointed them out with the compasses. “They will be laid almost up to the surface of the water, and then the upper stone layer of hewn stone will be placed on them. So you see what sort of work it is. Second to no Egyptian Pyramid. These are the general features of the work, which has already lasted some years. How much longer, goodness only knows. The longer the better⁠ ⁠… at the same time, if it proceeds at its present rate it will last out our century.”

“Well, and what else?” asked Vassili Petrovich after a long silence.

“What else? Well, we sit in our places and get as much as is necessary.”

“But I still do not see from your story how you get what money you want.”

“You innocent! Listen! By the way, we are, I think, of the same age. Only the experience which you lack has made me wiser⁠—has made me older. This is how it is: You know that on every sea there are storms? They do their work. Every year they wash away the beds, and we lay down a new one.”

“But, still, I don’t understand how⁠ ⁠…”

“We lay it down,” calmly continued Kudriasheff, “on paper, here on the drawing, because it is only on the drawing that the storms wash it away.”

Vassili Petrovich was completely bewildered.

“Because, waves cannot, in fact, wash away a bed only eight feet high. Our sea is not an ocean, and even in an ocean such moles as ours would stand. But with us in the two thousand sajenes depth, where the bed ends, it is almost a dead calm. Listen, Vassili Petrovich, how the thing is managed. In the spring, after the bad weather of the autumn and winter, we meet, and put the question, How much of the bed has been washed away this year? We take the drawings and note. Well, then, we write, ‘Washed away⁠—let us say, by storms⁠—so many cubic sajenes of work.’ And they reply, ‘Build and d⁠⸺⁠n you!’ Well, we ‘repair.’ ”

“But what do you repair?”

“Our pockets, of course,” said Kudriasheff, laughing at his joke.

“No, no, this cannot be; it is impossible!” cried Vassili Petrovich, jumping up from his chair and running up and down the room. “Listen, Kudriasheff, you are ruining yourself⁠ ⁠… not to mention the immorality of it.⁠ ⁠… I simply want to say that they will catch you all in this, and you will be done for⁠—will go to Siberia. Alas! what hopes! expectations! A capable, honourable young man⁠—and suddenly⁠ ⁠…”

Vassili Petrovich launched out into heroics, and spoke long and fervently. But Kudriasheff quite calmly smoked a cigar and watched his excited friend.

“Yes, you are sure to go to Siberia,” said Vassili Petrovich, as he concluded his harangue.

“It is a long way to Siberia, my friend. You are an extraordinary man; you don’t understand in the least. Am I really the only one who⁠ ⁠… to put it more politely⁠ ⁠… ‘acquires’? All around, even the air seems to pilfer. Not long ago a fresh hand appeared and began to write about honesty. What happened? We protected ourselves.⁠ ⁠… And always will protect ourselves. All for one, one for all. Do you imagine that man is his own enemy? Who will take upon himself to touch me when through me he himself may come to grief?”

“It means that everyone is guilty, as Kryloff said.”

“Guilty, guilty! All take what they can from life and do not regard it platonically.⁠ ⁠… But about what did we begin to talk? Ah yes, of about whom I am insulting? Tell me whom? The lower class? Well, how? I don’t take straight from the source, but I take what is ready and what has already been taken, and if I don’t take it somebody worse than I will take it. At any rate, I don’t live like a brute beast. I take some interest in intellectual matters. I subscribe to a whole bundle of papers and magazines. They cry out about science and civilization, but to what could it be applied if it were not for persons like us, people with means? And who would furnish science with the power to advance if not people with means? And means must be found somewhere, even in a so-called honest⁠ ⁠…”

“Oh, don’t finish, don’t say that last word, Nicolai Constantinovich.”

“Word? What? Would it be better for your warped mind if I commenced to lie to justify myself? We rob, do you hear? Yes, if the truth were spoken, you are now robbing.”

“Listen, Kudriasheff⁠ ⁠…”

“It is no use my listening,” replied Kudriasheff with a laugh. “You, too, my friend are a robber, under a mask of virtue. What is your occupation⁠—teaching? Will you really repay with your labour even the pittance which will be paid you? Will you turn out even one respectable man? Three-fourths of your pupils will become such as I am, and one-fourth like yourself⁠—that is, a well-intentioned ‘fainéant.’ Are you not taking money for nothing? Answer me frankly. And are you so far apart from me? Yet you put on airs and preach honour!”

“Kudriasheff, believe me, that this conversation is extremely painful to me.”

“And to me⁠—not in the least.”

“I did not expect to find what I have found in you.”

“That’s stupid. People change, and I have changed, but in what direction⁠—you could not guess. You are not a prophet.”

“It is not necessary to be a prophet to hope that an honourable youth will become an honourable citizen of the State.”

“Bah! drop it! Don’t use such words with me. ‘An honourable citizen!’ Out of what schoolbooks have you dug up this archaism? It is time to finish with sentimentalism; you are not a boy.⁠ ⁠… Do you know what Vasia⁠—” And here Kudriasheff took Vassili Petrovich by the arm. “Let us be friends and drop this infernal subject. Better to drink to our comradeship. Ivan Pavlich, bring another bottle of this.”

Ivan Pavlich slowly appeared with a fresh bottle. Kudriasheff filled the glasses.

“Well, we will drink to prosperity⁠ ⁠… of what? Well, it’s all the same for your and my prosperity.”

“I drink,” said Vassili Petrovich with feeling, “that you may come to your senses. That is my strongest wish.”

“Be a good chap and don’t talk about that.⁠ ⁠… If I come to my senses, it will be impossible to drink; then things will be in a bad way. Do you see what your logic amounts to? Let us drink just simply without any toasts. Let us drop this boring argument. It is all the same, we shall not come to any agreement. You will not put me on the true path, and I shall not convince you. It is not worth it. You will come round to my views.”

“Never!” exclaimed Vassili Petrovich with warmth, banging his glass on the table.

“Well, we’ll see. But why have I told you all about myself, and you have said nothing about yourself? What have you been doing, and what are your plans?”

“I have already told you I have been appointed teacher.”

“Is this your first place?”

“Yes, before this I used to give private lessons.”

“And do you intend to give them here?”

“If I can find any. Why?”

“We will find some, my dear chap; we will find some,” and Kudriasheff slapped Vassili Petrovich on the shoulder. “We will hand over all the local youth to you. How much did you charge an hour in Petersburg?”

“Very little. It was very difficult to get good lessons. About two roubles, not more.”

“And for such pittance a human being wears himself out! Well, here, don’t you dare to ask less than five roubles. It is hard work. I remember how I used to run after extra work during my first and second years. At the University there were times when I was glad to get fifty kopecks an hour. A most thankless and difficult work. I will introduce you to all our friends. There are some very nice families here, and young ladies. If you behave cleverly, I will get you engaged if you like. Eh, Vassili Petrovich?”

“No, thank you.”

“What, engaged already? Really?”

Vassili Petrovich’s face betrayed his confusion.

“Yes, I see it by your eyes. Well, old chap, I congratulate you. How soon? But Vasia! Ivan Pavlich!” shouted Kudriasheff.

Ivan Pavlich appeared at the door with a surly expression on his sleepy face.

“Bring some champagne!”

“There is none⁠—all drunk,” replied the man morosely.

“Don’t bother, Kudriasheff. Why all this?”

“Silence, I am not asking you. Do you want to insult me, or what? Ivan Pavlich, don’t come back without the champagne, do you hear? Be off!”

“But everything is closed, Nicolai Constantinovich.”

“Don’t argue with me. You have the money. Be off and get some.”

The butler went off muttering something to himself.

“The sulky beast is still grumbling. And you, too, with your ‘Don’t bother.’ If we are not to drink on such an occasion as this, what does champagne exist for?⁠ ⁠… Well, who is she?”

“Who?”

“Who, why she, your fiancée.⁠ ⁠… Pauper, heiress, nice?”

“It’s all the same to you⁠—you don’t know her, so why tell you her name? She has no money, and beauty⁠—that is a matter of taste. In my opinion she is beautiful.”

“Have you a photograph?” asked Kudriasheff. “Bring it out. Do you carry it next to your heart? Show it me?”

And he stretched out his hand.

Vassili Petrovich’s face, flushed from the wine, became still redder. Not knowing why, he unbuttoned his coat, took out his pocketbook and the precious photograph. Kudriasheff seized it and began to examine it.

“Not so bad, my dear chap. You know a good thing when you see it.”

“Cannot you talk without using those expressions?” said Vassili Petrovich curtly. “Give it me back. I will put it away.”

“Wait a bit. Let me enjoy it. I wish you all luck and prosperity. Well, take it and put it back against your heart. Oh, you wonder, marvel!” exclaimed Kudriasheff, laughing.

“I don’t understand what you have found laughable in this?”

“Well, my dear chap, it is funny. I can picture to myself what you will be like in ten years’ time: you in a dressing-gown, a wife, seven children, and no money with which to buy them shoes, breeches, hats, etc. Prosaic. Will you, then, carry this photograph about in your breast-pocket? Ha, ha, ha!”

“It would be more to the point if you will inform me what poetry awaits you in the future? Get money and spend it? Eat, drink, and sleep?”

“Not to eat, drink, and sleep, but to live. Live with a consciousness of one’s freedom, and even a certain power.”

“Power? What power have you got?”

“There is power in money, and I have money. I do what I like.⁠ ⁠… If I wish to buy you⁠—I shall buy you.”

“Kudriasheff!⁠ ⁠…”

“Don’t get on the high horse about nothing. Surely old friends may joke with each other? Of course, I shall not try to buy you. Live your own way as you like. All the same, I do what I wish. Oh, what a fool, an idiot, I am!” suddenly exclaimed Kudriasheff, hitting his forehead. “Here we are, and have been sitting for I don’t know how long, and I haven’t shown you the sight. You talk about eating, drinking, and sleeping. I will show you something in a minute which will make you take back your words. Come along. Bring a candle.”

“Where?” asked Vassili Petrovich.

“Follow me. You will see where.” Vassili Petrovich, as he rose from the table, felt that all was not as it should be. His legs were not altogether obedient, and he could not hold the candlestick without dropping candle-grease on the carpet. However, obtaining some sort of control over his recalcitrant limbs, he followed behind Kudriasheff. They passed through several rooms along a narrow passage, and appeared in a damp and dark compartment. Their footsteps resounded dully on the stone floor. The noise of falling water somewhere sounded in never-ceasing accord. Stalactites of dark blue glass hung from the ceiling. Artificial rocks rose here and there half covered by masses of tropical foliage and panes of glass glistened darkly in certain places.

“What is this?” asked Vassili Petrovich.

“An aquarium to which I have devoted two years of time and much money. Wait a moment, and I will light it up.”

Kudriasheff disappeared behind some foliage, and Vassili Petrovich went up to one of the panes of glass and commenced to examine what was behind it. The feeble light of the candle could not penetrate far into the water, but the fish, large and small, attracted by the bright light, collected in the part which was lighted up, and gazed stupidly at Vassili Petrovich with their round eyes, opening and shutting their mouths, and moving their gills and fins.

Farther off there loomed up the dark outlines of seaweed, amongst which some kind of reptile was moving, although Vassili Petrovich could not discern its precise form.

Suddenly a flood of blinding light compelled him momentarily to close his eyes, and when he again opened them, he did not recognize the aquarium. Kudriasheff had turned on electric light in two places. The light from the lamps penetrated the mass of blue water, swarming with fish and other live creatures, and filled with growth which showed up boldly against the undefined background in silhouettes of blood-red, brown, and dark green. The rocks and tropical growth, made still darker by contrast, prettily framed the thick glass through which a view of the inside of the aquarium was opened up. In the aquarium all was a seething, hurrying mass, alarmed by the dazzling light. A whole shoal of small but big-headed chub rushed hither and thither, turning as if by word of command, sterlets wriggled about with their noses stuck to the glass, now rising to the surface, now sinking to the bottom of the water just as if they wished to break through the transparent but hard obstacle. A smooth black eel buried himself in the sand at the bottom of the aquarium, raising a whole cloud of mud. A ridiculous stumpy cuttlefish detached himself from the rock on which he was resting, and swam jerkily backwards across the aquarium, dragging his long feelers behind him. Altogether it was so pretty and so new to Vassili Petrovich, that he was entranced.

“Well, Vassili Petrovich, what do you think of it?” asked Kudriasheff, coming out to him.

“Marvellous! Extraordinary! How did you arrange all this? What taste and effect!”

“Add also knowledge. I went to Berlin expressly to examine the aquarium there, and, without boasting, I will say that mine, although, of course, it is not so big, is not in any way inferior in point of beauty and interest.⁠ ⁠… This aquarium is my pride and consolation. However bored, it is only necessary to come here, and I can sit and gaze by the hour. I like all these fish, etc., because they are frank, and not like our friend man. They go for each other without the least shame. Look, look! Do you see? A chase!”

A small fish was impetuously rushing now to the surface, then to the bottom, and in every direction trying to escape from some long marauder. In its mortal terror it kept jumping out of the water into the air, or trying to conceal itself in the recesses of the rocks, but keen teeth were chasing it from all sides. The pirate was just on the point of seizing his quarry, when suddenly another robber darted in from the side, made a grab, and the little fish disappeared in its jaws. The pursuer stopped perplexed, and the robber hid itself in a dark corner.

“Snatched away,” said Kudriasheff. “Idiot! got nothing. Was it worth chasing simply for the booty to be taken from under your very nose?⁠ ⁠… If only you knew how they feed on these little fish: today a whole shoal is put in, and by tomorrow it has disappeared, gone⁠—eaten up. They eat each other and never dream about immorality; but we? I have only just got rid of this fiddle-faddle, Vassili Petrovich. Don’t you really in the end agree that it is all fiddle-faddle?”

“What is?” inquired Vassili Petrovich, not taking his eyes off the water.

“Why, these gnawings. What are they for? Your conscience may prick you, but still⁠ ⁠… Well, I have got rid of them now, and I try to imitate these creatures.”

He pointed with his finger to the aquarium.

“Do as you like,” said Vassili Petrovich with a sigh. “Listen, Kudriasheff. Surely all this growth, all these fish⁠—it is all saltwater life.”

“Yes, and the water is seawater. I have laid down a pipe on purpose.”

“What, from the sea? But all this must cost an enormous lot?”

“Yes. My aquarium costs about thirty thousand roubles.”

“Thirty thousand!” exclaimed Vassili Petrovich in a horrified tone. “With a salary of one thousand six hundred roubles a year?”

“Oh, drop this honour! If you have looked at it we will go back. Ivan Pavlich by now should have brought the required⁠ ⁠… Only wait a moment whilst I switch off the light.”

The aquarium again became plunged in gloom. The still burning candle appeared a dull, smoky little light to Vassili Petrovich.

When they reached the dining-room, Ivan Pavlich was waiting, and holding a bottle wrapped in a serviette in readiness.

Officer and Soldier-Servant

“Undress!” said the doctor to Nikita, who was standing motionless, his eyes fixed on space. Nikita gave a start, and hurriedly commenced to unfasten his clothes.

“A bit faster, friend!” cried the doctor impatiently; “you see what a lot of you there are here.”

He pointed to the crowd in the room.

“Turn round!⁠ ⁠… Lost your senses?” added by way of assistance the N.C.O. who was taking the measurements.

Nikita made even more haste, threw off his shirt and trousers, and stood in a state of nature. That there is nothing more beautiful than the human form has often been said by someone, somewhen, and somewhere, but if he who first made this pronouncement had lived in the seventies, and had seen the naked Nikita, he would certainly have retracted his words.

Before the Military Service Commission there stood a little man with a disproportionately large stomach, a legacy from generations of ancestors who had never tasted pure bread⁠—and long withered arms furnished with huge black knotted fists. His long awkward body was supported by very short bandy legs, and the whole figure was crowned by a head⁠ ⁠… what a head it was! The facial bones had been developed at the expense of the skull. His forehead was low and narrow, and his eyes, without brows or lashes, were little more than slits. On an enormous flat face forlornly sat a little round nose which, although carried high, not only failed to give the face an expression of haughtiness, but, on the contrary, made it look still more woeful. The mouth, in contrast to the nose, was enormous, and presented the appearance of a shapeless chasm, unadorned, notwithstanding Nikita’s twenty years, by one single hair. Nikita stood with his head lowered, his shoulders forward, his arms hanging like whipcords by his sides, and his feet slightly turned in.

“Ape!” said a rather stout, brisk-mannered Colonel, the military head of the Commission, leaning towards a spare young man with a handsome beard, a member of the Zemstvo Board, “a regular ape!”

“A splendid confirmation of Darwin’s theory,” murmured the Zemstvo official, to which the Colonel loudly assented, and turned to the doctor.

“Well, of course he is fit! He is sound,” replied the latter.

“Only he will not go to the Guards, ha, ha, ha!” said the Colonel, laughing heartily, but not unkindly; then, turning to Nikita, he added in a quiet tone: “Present yourself here in a fortnight’s time. The next man, Parfen Semenoff, undress!”

Nikita began slowly to dress himself; his arms and legs were all over the place, and refused to do as bid. He kept whispering something to himself, but precisely what it was he himself probably did not know. He understood only that they had declared him fit for service, and that within a fortnight they would drive him from home for some years. Only this was in his head, and only this thought pierced its way through the maze and stupor in which he was enveloped. Finally, having successfully reduced his arms to obedience, he put on his belt, and left the room in which the medical examination was taking place. A little doubled-up old man of some sixty years of age met him in the passage.

“Have they taken you?” he asked.

Nikita did not answer, and the old man knew that it was so, and did not ask any more questions. They went out into the street. It was a bright frosty day. A crowd of muzhiks and babas were standing about waiting. Many were stamping their feet, and beating themselves with their arms to keep warm. The snow crunched under their bast shoes and boots, and steam was rising from their heads enveloped in shawls and from the little shaggy ponies which had brought their masters in from the surrounding villages.

The smoke from the chimneys in the little town was rising in straight tall columns.

“Have they taken yours, Ivan?” inquired an old man, a sturdy-looking muzhik in a new tanned coat, a big sheepskin cap, and good boots.

“They have taken him. Ilia Savelich, taken him. It was God’s will to do us this injury.”

“What will you do now?”

“What is there to do? The will of God⁠ ⁠… there was one helper in the family, and now he’s gone⁠ ⁠… and⁠ ⁠…”

Ivan made a gesture with his hand.

“You should have adopted him sooner,” said Ilia Savelich, with an air of conviction, “then he would have been saved.”

“Who knew of it? We knew nothing. He was instead of my son, and once again the only helper in the family.⁠ ⁠… I thought that for this reason the gentleman would have allowed it. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘impossible, because it is the law.’ ‘How can it be the law, Your Excellency,’ I said, ‘when his wife is in labour? Besides, Your Excellency,’ I said, ‘it is impossible for me, one⁠ ⁠…’ ‘No, we know nothing of this,’ he said, ‘and by the law as it stands he is an orphan, alone, and so he must serve. Who is to blame,’ he said, ‘that he has a wife and son? If he chose to marry when he was fifteen⁠—’

“I wanted to explain to him, but he would not listen, and got angry. ‘Go, go away,’ he said, ‘there is plenty of work without you bothering me.⁠ ⁠…’ What is to be done?⁠ ⁠… God’s will.”

“Yours was a quiet young fellow?”

“Yes, quiet and hardworking, and never have I heard a word in argument from him. Ilia, as I tell you⁠ ⁠… he has been better than a son to me. This is our grief.⁠ ⁠… God sent him, and God has taken him away.⁠ ⁠… Goodbye, Ilia Savelich; and yours, will they look at him soon?”

“That depends on the authorities⁠ ⁠… only they cannot call my son fit. He is a cripple.”

“That’s your happiness, Ilia Savelich.”

“Eh, but what are you saying! Are you not afraid to say that? Eh, eh, ‘happiness’ that a son was born lame.”

“Well, Ilia Savelich, it has turned out for the better; he will always be at home. Goodbye, and good health to you.”

“Goodbye, friend⁠ ⁠… and what about that little loan? Have you forgotten it?”

“Impossible, Ilia Savelich⁠ ⁠… that is⁠—cannot be done. It is only a trifle; you can wait, and we are in such trouble.⁠ ⁠…”

“All right! all right! we will talk about it another time. Goodbye, Ivan Petrovich.”

“Goodbye, Ilia Savelich, good health to you.”

Nikita at this moment untied the horse from the post to which it was fastened, and he, with his adopted father, settled themselves in the sleigh, and started off. It was fifteen versts to their village. The little pony went along bravely, throwing up balls of snow with his hoofs, which broke up in their flight, falling in showers on Nikita. But Nikita lay silent near his father, wrapped up in his sheepskin, without saying a word. Twice the old man spoke to him, but received no reply. He seemed to have become petrified, and gazed fixedly at the snow, as if seeking in it some point forgotten by him in the rooms of the Commission.

Having arrived, they went straight into the hut and gave the news. The family, which consisted, in addition to the men, of three women and three children of Ivan Petrovich’s son who had died last year, commenced to wail.

Nikita’s wife, Praskovia, collapsed. The women cried for a whole week. How this week passed for Nikita no one knows, because the whole time he maintained a rigid silence, his face preserving the same set expression of submissive despair.

Eventually it all came to an end. Ivan took the recruit to the town, and handed him over at the mustering-place. Two days later Nikita, one of a party of recruits, marched over the snowdrifts along the main road to the provincial capital where the regiment to which he had been drafted was quartered. He was clothed in a new short half-shuba, in trousers of thick black material, new valenkies, a cap, and mitts. In his wallet, besides two changes of linen and some pies, there lay a rouble note carefully wrapped up in a handkerchief. Nikita was indebted for all this to his adopted father, Ivan Petrovich, who had implored Ilia Savelich to make him a further advance so as to equip Nikita for service.

Nikita proved to be a very poor recruit. The instructor to whom he was handed over for his preliminary drills was in despair. Notwithstanding every conceivable explanation on his part to Nikita, amongst which cuffs and blows played a certain role, his pupil could not even entirely master the not difficult problem of forming fours. The figure of Nikita dressed up in uniform presented a sorry spectacle. In front of him projected his stomach, and in his efforts to draw it in he threw out his chest, leaning forward with his whole body at an angle which threatened to bring him down face forwards to the ground. Knock him about as they would, the authorities could not make out of Nikita even a most indifferent front-rank man. During company drill his Captain, having abused Nikita, would “tell off” the section N.C.O., who would pass it on to Nikita. The punishment awarded consisted of extra “fatigues.” Soon, however, the N.C.O. guessed that this was no punishment, but a pleasure to Nikita. He was a wonderful worker, and the duties of carrying wood and water, attending the stores, but chiefly keeping the barrack quarters clean⁠—i.e., endless swabbing the floors with a damp mop⁠—were to his liking. At any rate, whilst performing this work he was not obliged to think how not to get out of step, and not to go left when the command was “Right turn,” and, besides, he felt quite safe from terrifying questions on that wonderful science known in soldier’s language as “literature,” such as: “What is a soldier?” “What is a colour?”

Nikita knew quite well what were colours. He was prepared with all possible zeal to carry out his obligations and duties as a soldier, and would probably have given his life in defence of the colours, but to define them verbatim as set forth in the book was beyond him.

“The colour is⁠ ⁠… which colour, colour⁠ ⁠…” he used to murmur, endeavouring as far as possible to straighten out his clumsy body, poking out his chin, and screwing up his eyes bare of all lashes.

“Fool!” would cry the consumptive N.C.O. giving the lesson. “Am I to teach you your alphabet? How much longer am I to be tormented with you? You idiot! you clodhopper! Tfy!⁠ ⁠… How many times must I repeat it to you? Now say it after me⁠—the colour is a sacred banner.⁠ ⁠…”

Nikita could not repeat even these few words. The threatening aspect of the N.C.O. and his shouting had a stupefying effect on him. There was a ringing in his ears, stars were dancing before his eyes. He heard nothing of the definition of a colour; his lips did not move. He stood silent.

“Go on; the D⁠⸺ take you! The colour is a sacred banner.”

“The colour⁠ ⁠…”

“Well?⁠ ⁠…”

“… Banner⁠ ⁠…” continued Nikita in a trembling voice, with tears in his eyes.

“Is a sacred banner!” yelled the maddened N.C.O.

“Sacred which.⁠ ⁠…”

Then the N.C.O. would commence to rush from corner to corner, spitting and swearing, whilst Nikita remained perfectly still in the same place and in the same attitude, following his infuriated superior with his eyes. He was not upset by the abuse and epithets showered on him, but only grieved wholeheartedly at his inability to do his superior’s bidding.

“Three days’ extra duty!” the worn-out N.C.O. would gasp in a voice rendered faint and hoarse from shouting, and Nikita would thank God to be freed at least for a time from the hated “literature” and drill.

When it was noticed that the punishment awarded Nikita not only did not distress him, but even afforded him real pleasure, Nikita was placed under arrest. Finally, having exhausted all means for the reformation of the unfortunate man, the authorities washed their hands of him.

“Nothing can be done with Ivanoff,” was the almost daily complaint of the Company Sergeant-Major, when making his morning report to the Company Commander.

“About Ivanoff?⁠ ⁠… Oh yes. Let me see, what is it he is doing?” the Captain would ask as he sat in his dressing-gown, smoking a cigarette between the intervals of sipping tea out of a glass in an electroplated holder.

“Nothing, Your Excellency; he is not doing anything. As a man he is quiet, only he cannot understand anything.”

“Try something,” the Captain would say meditatively, blowing rings of tobacco smoke.

“We have tried, Your Excellency, but nothing comes of it.”

“Well! What can I do with him? You will agree at least that I am but a mortal, and cannot work miracles. Eh? Well, idiot, do something with him⁠ ⁠… and get out!”

Eventually the Company Commander became bored with hearing daily complaints from the Sergeant-Major about Nikita.

“Stop talking about your Ivanoff!” he shouted. “Don’t try to teach him; give him up. Do what you like with him, only don’t bring him up before me.”

The Company Sergeant-Major tried to arrange a transfer of Nikita Ivanoff to the “employed” men’s Company, but there were already plenty of “employed” men. An attempt to make him an officer’s servant was equally unsuccessful, as all the officers already had servants. Then Nikita was saddled with all the dirty work of the battalion, and all attempts to make him a soldier were abandoned. Thus he lived for a year until the arrival of a newly-appointed subaltern officer, Second Lieutenant Stebelkoff.

Nikita was told off as “permanent orderly” to him⁠—in plain language, to be his soldier-servant.

Alexander Michailovich Stebelkoff, Nikita’s new master, was a very kind young fellow of average height, with a shaven chin and a magnificently pointed moustache, which he from time to time, not without a feeling of pride, used to stroke lightly with his left hand. He had just passed through the cadet school without having displayed during his time there any special taste for sciences, but had learnt his drill to perfection. He was thoroughly happy in his present position. The two years spent at the school on Government fare, under the strict supervision of the authorities, the entire absence of friends to whom he could have gone on holidays in search of relaxation from the barrack life of the school, and not possessed of a kopeck of private money with which he could have amused himself, had all wearied him, and now, as an officer receiving forty roubles a month pay, commanding a half-company of soldiers, and a soldier-servant at his absolute disposal, he for the time at least wanted nothing more. “Good, very good,” he thought, as he went to sleep, and again awaking he first of all remembered he was no longer a cadet, but an officer, that there was no longer need to jump out of bed on the instant and dress, under fear of the orderly-officer, but that he could roll over again, make himself snug, and smoke a cigarette.

“Nikita!” he would call, and Nikita, in a faded rose-coloured cotton shirt, black cloth trousers, and a pair of old big rubber galoshes (goodness knows how he had become possessed of them) on his bare feet, would appear at the door leading from the single room of Stebelkoff’s flat into the passage.

“Cold today?”

“I cannot tell you, Your Excellency,” Nikita would reply timidly.

“Go and look! and come and tell me!”

Off would go Nikita into the frost, and in the course of a minute reappear.

“Very cold, sir.”

“Is there a wind?”

“I cannot tell you, Your Excellency.”

“Ass! Why can’t you tell? Surely you were in the courtyard?”

“In the yard there is none, sir.”

“None.⁠ ⁠… Go out into the street.”

Nikita would go out into the street, and return with the information that there was a “healthy” wind.

“No parade, sir, so Sidoroff says,” he would venture to add.

“All right; clear out!” and Alexander Michailovich would then turn over in his bunk, pull the warm blanket over him, and, half dozing, would commence to think to the accompaniment of the crackling of brightly-burning wood in the stove which had been lit by Nikita. Cadet life appeared to him as an unpleasant dream, although it was not so long ago that the drum used to beat right at his ear, and he would have to jump out of bed shivering from the cold.⁠ ⁠… These recollections would awake others, also not particularly pleasing. Poverty, and the squalid surroundings and life of a small official, a habitually sullen mother, a tall lean woman, with a severe expression on her thin face which seemed a perpetual defiance to anyone bold enough to insult her. A crowd of brothers and sisters; the constant quarrels between them. His mother’s railings against fate, an everlasting exchange of abuse between his parents whenever his father came home drunk. The school in which, in spite of all efforts, it was so difficult to learn. The teasing of his schoolmates, who for some unknown reason had bestowed on him the extremely insulting nickname of the “herring.” His failure in the examination on Russian. The depressing, humiliating scene when he was turned out of the school in consequence, and arrived home in tears. His father was asleep on the chintz-covered sofa drunk. His mother was fussing about the kitchen at the stove preparing dinner. Seeing Sasha in tears with his books, she guessed what had happened, and after showering abuse on him had rushed off to his father, awakened him, and explained what had happened, and his father had thereupon beaten him.

Sasha was then fifteen years old. Two years later he took up military service as a volunteer, and at twenty years of age was already an independent man, a Second Lieutenant in an infantry regiment of the Line.⁠ ⁠…

“It is very nice,” he would reflect, as he lay under the blanket.⁠ ⁠… “This evening at the Club there is to be a dance.”

And Alexander Michailovich would picture to himself the hall of the Officers’ Club brilliantly lighted up, the heat, and music, and young girls in long rows seated along the wall, only waiting for some young ofhcer to invite them to take a few turns in a waltz. And Stebelkoff with a click of his heels (What a pity, dash it! he sighed, he could not wear spurs), and neatly bending before the Major’s pretty daughter, with a graceful sweep of his hand would say “Permettez,” and the Major’s daughter, placing her little hand on his shoulder near his epaulette, they would glide away.⁠ ⁠…

“Yes, that’s not being a ‘herring’⁠—how idiotic, and why a ‘herring’? Those who attend the first course at the University are much more like herrings, going there and starving, but I⁠ ⁠… And why is it absolutely necessary to go to the University? We will allow that a magistrate or doctor receives a bigger salary than my pay, but think how long it takes to get it!⁠ ⁠… and all this time one must live at one’s own expense. But with us, once you get into the school everything goes of itself. If one serves well it is possible to become a General.⁠ ⁠… Ah, then I would give it⁠ ⁠…” Alexander Michailovich did not say to whom or what he would give, for other reminiscences than of “herrings” at this instance flashed into his mind.

“Nikita,” he called, “have we any tea?”

“None at all. Your Excellency⁠—all used.”

“Go out and buy some;” and then he would draw his new purse from under the pillow, and give Nikita the money, and whilst Nikita is out getting the tea Alexander Michailovich continues his reveries, but before Nikita returns has succeeded in going to sleep again.

“Sir! Your Excellency!” whispers Nikita.

“What? Eh? Have you got the tea? All right, I will get up in a moment.⁠ ⁠… Help me dress.”

Alexander Michailovich, both at home and at the school, had always dressed himself (excepting, of course, during his babyhood), but having become possessed of a manservant, he in two weeks had absolutely forgotten how to put on or take off his clothes. Nikita pulls on his master’s socks and boots, helps him with his trousers, throws around his master’s shoulders the summer military cloak which does duty as a dressing-gown. And Alexander Michailovich, without washing, sits down to drink his morning tea.

They bring him the lithographed regimental orders, and Stebelkoff, reading it from beginning to end, notes with satisfaction that his turn for “guard” is still far off. “But what is this novelty?” he wonders as he reads:

“With a view to maintaining the standard of knowledge amongst officers of the regiment, Captain Ermolin and Lieutenant Petroff (2nd) are detailed from the commencement of next week to lecture, the former on tactics, the latter on fortification. Further special notice will be given as to the hours for these lectures, which will take place in the Officers’ Club.”

“Well! Goodness knows, I suppose I shall have to go and listen,” thinks Alexander Michailovich. “They were boring enough at the school, and they will not say anything new, but will only read from the old handbooks.”

Having read through the Orders and finished his tea, Alexander Michailovich orders Nikita to clear away the samovar, and settles himself down to roll cigarettes, continuing the while his never-ending cogitations about his past, present, and future, which last promises him, if not the embonpoint of a General, at least the substantial epaulettes of a Staff-Officer. And when all the cigarettes have been rolled he lies on his bed, and reads the back numbers of the Niva, looking at the already familiar pictures, and not missing a line of the text. Finally, from long lying and reading, his head begins to get dizzy.

“Nikita!” he shouts.

Nikita jumps up from the cloak stretched out on the floor in the passage near the stove, which serves him as a bed, and rushes to the Barin.

“See what time it is!⁠ ⁠… No, better bring me my watch.”

Nikita gingerly takes up a silver watch, with its chain of new gold, from the table, and, having handed it to his master again, repairs into the passage to his cloak.

“Half-past one⁠ ⁠… about time to dine,” thinks Stebelkoff, winding up the watch with a brass key which he had just purchased, and in the head of which was inserted a little photographic picture visible in magnified shape if held up to the light. Alexander Michailovich looks at the picture, screwing up his left eye, and smiles. “What extraordinarily amusing things they make nowadays, to be sure,” he reflects, “and how clever.⁠ ⁠… However, I must be going.⁠ ⁠… Nikita!” he shouts.

Nikita appears.

“I want to wash.”

Nikita brings an unpainted deal stool into the room, and places a wash-hand basin on it. Alexander Michailovich begins to wash. The icy cold water scarcely touches his hands before he yells out.

“How many times have I told you, you clown, to leave the water in the room overnight. This water is cold enough to freeze one’s face.⁠ ⁠… Idiot!”

Nikita, fully conscious of the enormity of his crime, remains silent, and continues busily to pour water into the enraged gentleman’s palms.

“Have you brushed my tunic?”

“Yes, Your Excellency, I have brushed it,” replies Nikita, as he gives the Barin a new tunic, with glistening gold shoulder-straps, decorated with a numeral and one star, which had been hanging on the back of a chair.

Before putting it on Alexander Michailovich attentively inspects the dark green cloth, and finds a piece of fluff on it.

“What’s this? Is this what you call cleaning? Is this the way you do your work? Clear out, you fool, and brush it again.”

Nikita goes out into the passage, and begins to extract apparently from the brush, with the aid of the tunic, sounds known as “shooing.” Stebelkoff, with the aid of a folding mirror in a yellow wooden frame and pommade hongroise, begins to bring his moustaches to the greatest possible perfection. Finally they are reduced to order, but the noise in the passage continues.

“Here, give me that tunic; you will go on cleaning it until the crack of doom.⁠ ⁠… I am already late through you, ass!⁠ ⁠…”

Then, carefully buttoning up his coat, fastening on his sword, and putting on his galoshes, Alexander Michailovich goes out into the street, stamping with his feet along the frozen boards of the path.

The rest of the day passes in dining, reading the Russki Invalid, and in conversation with his brother-officers about the Service, promotion, and pay. In the evening Alexander Michailovich goes to the Club, and flashes in the “whirl of a waltz” with the Major’s daughter. He returns home late, tired, and a little excited from several drinks taken during the evening, but contented.⁠ ⁠… Life was varied only by drill, guards, camp in the summer, sometimes manoeuvres, and occasionally by lectures on fortification and tactics which it was impossible to avoid. And so the years roll on, leaving no traces on Stebelkoff, save that the colour of his face changes and signs of baldness become manifest, whilst instead of one star on the shoulder-straps there appear two, three, and then four stars.⁠ ⁠…

What does Nikita do all this time? Nikita lies for the most part on his cloak near the stove, jumping up every few minutes in answer to the never-ending demands of the Barin. In the morning he has quite a lot to do. There is the stove to be lighted, the samovar prepared, water brought, boots and uniform to be cleaned, the Barin to be dressed when he gets up, and the room to be swept and tidied. (It is true this last does not take up much time, as the whole furniture consists only of a bed, a table, three chairs, a cupboard, and a portmanteau.) Nevertheless all this is work for Nikita. When his master has gone out there commences a long, long day to be spent in the compulsory doing of nothing, broken only by a journey to the barracks for his dinner from the Company kitchen. Whilst living in barracks Nikita had learnt a little cobbling⁠—how to patch and resole boots, and to piece heels. When he was transferred to Stebelkoff he thought of continuing his trade, and used to hide the bag containing his work behind the door in the passage as soon as there was a knock at the door. The Barin having noticed for several days that there was a strong smell of leather in the passage, sought out the cause, and gave Nikita a severe “head-washing,” after which he ordered that it “must never occur again.” Then there was nothing left for Nikita to do but to lie on his cloak and think. And he used to lie there thinking through whole evenings, dozing off and on until a knock at the door notified his master’s return. Then Nikita would undress Alexander Michailovich, and soon afterwards the little flat would be buried in darkness⁠—officer and servant both asleep.

The wind drones and howls, and the snow beats in whirling flakes against the window, representing to the sleeping Stebelkoff the noise of ballroom music. In his sleep he sees a brilliantly-lighted hall such as he had hitherto never seen, full of smartly-dressed strangers. However, he does not feel at all confused, but, on the contrary, the hero of the evening. There are people he knows in the hall, too. Their attitude towards him is not as it has been usually, but is one of enthusiasm. His Colonel, instead of giving him the usual two fingers, presses his hand warmly in his own fat fist. Major Khlobuschin, who had always looked somewhat askance at Stebelkoff’s wooing of his daughter, himself now leads her to him, submissively bowing. What he had done or for what they are praising him he does not know, but that he had done something was evident. Glancing at his shoulders, he sees on them a General’s epaulettes. The music resounds, the couples glide off, and he, too, floats away somewhere ever farther and farther, ever higher and higher. The brilliantly-lighted hall becomes a mere speck of distant light. Around him are a great number of persons in various uniforms. They are all asking his orders. He does not know about what they are asking, but gives his instructions. Orderlies gallop to and from him. The distant roar of cannon is heard. There is the clash of martial music as regiment after regiment marches past him. All are moving forward. The guns sound closer and closer, and Stebelkoff becomes terrified; “They are killing people,” he thinks. And an awful yell resounds from every side. Terrible, monstrous, and ferocious beings, such as he had never seen anywhere, rush at him. They come ever closer; Stebelkoff’s heart contracts with the indescribable fear experienced only in dreams, and he shouts “Nikita!”

The wind drones and howls, and the snow beats in whirling flakes against the window, and it seems to the sleeping Nikita a real wind and real bad weather. He dreams he is lying in his own hut alone. No one is near him⁠—no wife, no father⁠—not one of his belongings. He does not know how he got home, and is afraid he must have deserted. He is certain that they are after him, and feels that they are near, and wishes to run away and hide somewhere, but is unable to move a limb. Then he cries out, and the whole hut is filled with people, all his village acquaintances, but their faces are all extraordinary. “How do you do, Nikita?” they say to him. “All yours, my friend, have gone! God has taken them all. All have died. There they are; look there!” and Nikita sees his whole family in a crowd together⁠—Ivan, his wife, and Aunt Praskovia, and the children. And he understands that, although they are all standing together, they are all dead, and that all his village friends are dead. That is why they look so odd, and are laughing so strangely. They come towards him, and seize hold of him, but he breaks away from them, and runs over the snowdrifts, stumbling and falling. The dead are no longer pursuing him, but Lieutenant Stebelkoff, with soldiers. And he runs on and on, and the Lieutenant keeps crying out to him: “Nikita! Nikita! Nikita!”

“Nikita!” shouts out Stebelkoff in reality, and Nikita, awaking, jumps up, and gropes his way into the room in his bare feet.

“What’s the matter with you? D⁠⸺ you! Are you making a fool of me, or what? How many times have I told you to place some matches near me? You sleep like a lout! I have been calling you for half an hour. Give me some matches.”

The sleepy Nikita fumbles about the table and window until he finds the matches, then lights a candle stuck in a brass candlestick, which is turning green with verdigris, and, all the time blinking his eyes, gives it to his master. Alexander Michailovich smokes a cigarette, and within a quarter of an hour’s time officer and soldier-servant are again wrapped in deep slumber.

A Night

Attalea Princeps

In a certain large town there was a botanical garden, and in this garden an enormous greenhouse of glass and iron. It was a very handsome building. Graceful spiral columns supported the whole structure, and on them rested ornamented arches interwoven by a whole web of iron frames, in which panes of glass were set. This greenhouse was especially beautiful when the setting sun was reflected redly against it. Then the whole building seemed alight. Crimson rays played and transfused just as in some gigantic, delicately-cut, precious stone.

Through the thick, but transparent, panes could be discerned the captive plants. Notwithstanding the size of the greenhouse its inmates felt cramped for space. Roots interlaced and robbed each other of moisture and sustenance. The branches of the trees interfered with the enormous leaves of palms, rotted and broke them, and pressing against the iron framework themselves rotted and snapped. The gardeners were constantly lopping off boughs and binding the palm-leaves with wires, so that they should not grow where they wished. But these efforts were of little avail. They needed space, their homeland and freedom. They were natives of hot climes, tender, luxurious creations. They remembered with longing the lands of their birth. However transparent the glass roof it was not the clear heavens. Occasionally in wintertime the panes became frosted, and then the greenhouse became quite dark. The wind would howl and beat against the iron framework, causing it to vibrate. The roof would be covered with drift-snow. The plants standing within would listen to the beating of the wind, and recall another wind, warm and moisture-laden, which used to give them life and health. And then they would long to feel its breath once more so that it might sway their boughs and play with their leaves. But in the greenhouse the air was motionless, excepting when winter storms shattered some of the glass panes; then a cutting cold current, a veritable icicle, would burst in on them, leaving faded, shrivelled leaves in its wake.

But the broken panes were always promptly mended. The Director of the gardens was a most learned man, who allowed no disorder of any kind, notwithstanding that the greater part of his time was spent with a microscope in a special little glass sentry-box situated in the main greenhouse.

Amongst the plants there was one palm taller and more beautiful than all the others. The Director, sitting in his sentry-box, called it in Latin Attalea Princeps. But this name was not its native name. Botanists had evolved this name. Botanists did not know its native name, which was not the name painted in black on the white board fastened to the trunk of the palm. Once a native from that hot country visited the gardens. When he saw this palm he laughed because it reminded him of home.

“Ah,” said he, “I know this tree,” and he called it by its home name.

“Excuse me,” called out from his sentry-box the Director, who at that moment had carefully performed some operation with a razor on a little stalk, “you are mistaken. There is no such tree as you were pleased to mention. That palm is Attalea Princeps, a native of Brazil.”

“Oh yes,” said the Brazilian, “I quite believe you. I quite believe that botanists call it Attalea, but it has a proper native name.”

“The proper name is that which is given by science,” replied the botanist frigidly, and he locked the door of his little sentry-box so that he should not be disturbed by people incapable even of understanding that if a man of science says something they must keep silence and listen.

But the Brazilian long stood and gazed at the palm, and he became more and more sad. He recalled his native land, its sunny skies, its luxuriant forests with their wondrous denizens, its birds, its open prairies, and magic southern nights. And he recalled that he had never been really happy outside the land of his birth although he had toured the world. He touched the palm with his hand as if bidding it farewell, and left the garden. The next day he started off by steamer for “home.”

But the palm remained. Life became even more burdensome to it now, although before this incident it had been very grievous. It towered five sajenes above the tops of all the other plants, and those other plants did not love it. They were jealous, and considered the palm proud. This growth caused the palm nothing but sorrow. Apart from the fact that the other plants were all together and it was alone, the palm best of all remembered its native skies, and mourned for them more than any of the others, because it was the nearest of all to that which supplanted those skies⁠—a disgusting glass roof. Through it the palm occasionally saw something blue; it was the sky, strange and pale, yet for all that genuine blue sky. And when the plants talked amongst themselves Attalea always kept silent, fretted, and thought only of how good it would be to stand even under this pitiful heaven.

“Tell me, please, will they soon water us?” inquired a sago-palm which was very fond of moisture. “I really think I shall wither up today.”

“Your words, my dear neighbour, astonish me,” said a potbellied cactus. “Do you really mean that the enormous quantity of water which they pour over you every day is insufficient? Look at me! They give me very little, but all the same I am fresh and full of sap.”

“We are not accustomed to be overcareful,” replied the sago-palm. “We cannot grow in such dry and vile soil as do certain cacti. We are not accustomed to live in hand-to-mouth style; moreover, apart from all this, I may mention that you are requested not to make remarks.” Having said this, the sago-palm took huff, and relapsed into silence.

“As far as I am concerned,” broke in a cinnamon, “I am practically satisfied with my position. Of course it is dull, but at least I am sure that no one will strip me.”

“But they used not to strip all of us,” said a tree-fern. “Of course, to many even this prison would appear Paradise after the miserable existence which they led when free.”

Thereupon the cinnamon, forgetting that they used to strip her, became offended, and started quarrelling. Some of the plants took her side and some took the part of the tree-fern, and a lively exchange of abuse commenced. They would undoubtedly have come to blows had they been able to move.

“Why are you quarrelling?” asked Attalea. “Does it really help you in any way? You only increase your unhappiness by being spiteful and losing your tempers. Far better to drop your quarrels and think. Listen to me! Grow taller and wider, throw out branches, press against the iron framework and glass panes, and then our greenhouse will break up into bits, and we shall gain freedom. If only one branch presses against the glass they will, of course, cut it off, but what will they do with a hundred strong and daring trunks? It is only necessary to be more friendly and to work together, and victory is ours!”

At first no one answered the palm. All kept silent, not knowing what to say. At last the sago-palm made up her mind.

“All ridiculous nonsense!” she declared.

“Ridiculous! Nonsense!” the trees chimed in, and everybody at one and the same time began to prove to Attalea that its proposal was awful nonsense.

“An impracticable dream!” they cried. “Bosh! Absurd! The framework is solid, and we shall never break it, and even if we did, what then? Men would come with knives and axes, lop off our boughs, mend the framework, and all would go on as before. All that would happen is that they would cut whole branches off us.⁠ ⁠…”

“Well, as you like!” replied Attalea. “Now I know what to do. I shall leave you all alone. Live how you like, growl at each other, argue about sips of water, and stay forever under a glass dome. I alone will find a way for myself. I want to see the sky and sun direct, not through this glass and grating⁠ ⁠… and I will.”

And the palm proudly glanced with her green top at the forest of comrades displayed below. No one dared say anything, only the sago-palm quietly whispered to her neighbour: “Well, we shall see⁠—we shall see how they will cut off her big head so that she does not get too conceited, Miss Proud!”

The others, although they kept silent, were angry with Attalea for her haughty words. Only one little herb was not angry with the palm, and not offended with what she had said. It was the most pitiful, contemptible herb of all the plants in the greenhouse, pale and poor, a creeper with fading, thickish leaves. There was nothing remarkable about it; and it was only used in the greenhouse to hide the bare soil. It had made itself the footstool of the big palm, and, listening to her, it seemed to the herb that Attalea was right. It did not know anything of Southern Nature, but it loved air and freedom. The greenhouse was a prison for it also. “If I, an insignificant faded herb, suffer so without my own grey sky, without my pale sun and cold rain, what must this beautiful and powerful palm suffer?” So thought the herb, and it tenderly entwined itself around the palm, caressing her the while. “Why am I not a great tree? I would listen to the advice. We would grow together, and together go out into freedom. Then the others would see that Attalea was right.” But it was not a great tree, only a little faded herb. It could only entwine itself still more tenderly round the trunk of Attalea, and whisper words of love to her and wishes for success in her efforts.

“Of course, with us it is nothing like so warm; the sky is not so clear, the rain is not so luxurious as in your country, but for all that we, too, have a sky, a sun, a breeze. We have not such gorgeous plants as you and your companions are, with such gigantic leaves and beautiful blossoms, but we also have very nice trees⁠—pines, firs, and birches. I am a little herb, and shall never attain freedom, but you are so great and strong! Your trunk is solid, and it will not be very long before you grow up to the glass roof. You will break it, and get out into God’s world. Then you will let me know if it is all as beautiful there still as it used to be. I shall be content with this.”

“Why, little herb, do you not wish to come out with me? My body is firm and strong; lean on it, climb up me. It will mean nothing to me to carry you.”

“No; where could I go? Look at me! See how faded I am, and how weak! I cannot rise even to one of your branches. No, I am no mate for you. Grow and be happy! Only when you go out into freedom I beg you sometimes to remember your little friend.”

Then the palm set to work to grow, and former visitors to the greenhouse were astonished when they came again at its gigantic growth. It grew taller and taller with every month. The Director of the botanical gardens attributed this rapidity of growth to the excellent care bestowed on it, and was proud of the skill with which he managed the greenhouse and did his business.

“Yes, look at Attalea Princeps,” he would say; “such well-grown specimens are rarely met with even in Brazil. We have applied all our knowledge to ensure that the plants shall develop in the greenhouse just as freely as when wild; and it seems to me we have attained a certain measure of success.”

And with a satisfied air he would strike the solid tree with his walking-stick, and the blows would resound loudly through the greenhouse. The leaves of the palm used to shake from these blows, and, oh! if only the palm could have groaned, what a howl of hate the Director would have heard.

“He imagines that I am growing for his delectation,” thought Attalea; “well, let him.”

And it grew, expending all its sap in order to extend itself, and thereby depriving its roots and leaves of moisture. Sometimes it seemed to the palm that the distance to the dome was not decreasing. Then it put forth all its strength, and the framework became closer and closer, and finally a young leaf touched the cold glass and iron.

“Look! look!” said the plants, “where she has got to! Does she really mean to do it?”

“How wonderfully she has grown!” said the tree-fern.

“What is there wonderful in her having grown up? There is nothing wonderful in that! Now, if she knew how to swell herself out like me,” said a portly sicada, with a trunk like a round O. “And what’s the good of stretching herself out? What will happen? Nothing will happen. It’s all the same. The bars are solid and firm, and the glass thick.”

Another month went by. Attalea continued to grow and raise herself. At last it was solidly against the framework. It could go no farther. Then the trunk began to bend. Its leafy top doubled up, and the cold framework pierced into the tender young leaves, cut through them, and deformed them, but the palm was obstinate, and did not spare its leaves. Notwithstanding everything it continued to press against the bars, and the bars were already yielding although they were made out of strong iron.

The little herb followed the struggle with attention, and almost swooned from excitement.

“Tell me,” it said, “surely it is painful for you? If the framework is so solid, would it not be better to give it up?” it inquired of the palm.

“Painful? What does it matter whether it is painful or not when I wish to gain my freedom? Did not you yourself encourage me?” replied the palm.

“Yes, yes; but I did not know it would be so difficult. I am sorry for you. You are suffering so.”

“Silence, weak plant! Do not pity me. I shall free myself or die!”

And at that very moment there was a resounding crash. A thick iron bar had given way. Splinters of glass scattered around, and came ringing down. One splinter hit the Director’s hat as he was leaving the greenhouse.

“What was that?” he exclaimed with a shudder, as he saw portions of glass flying through the air. He ran out of the greenhouse, and looked up at the roof. The green crown of the palm had straightened itself, and was proudly protruding above the glass dome.

“Only this,” she thought, “and is it only for this that I have suffered so much and tortured myself so long? To attain which has been my greatest and highest aim!”

It was mid-autumn when Attalea straightened her top through the opening made. It was sleeting, a mixture of rain and snow. The wind was driving along low grey masses of clouds. It seemed to the palm that they would seize her. The trees were already bare, and resembled shapeless skeletons. Only the pines and firs retained their dark green tips. The trees looked at the palm sullenly. “You will be frozen,” they seemed to say to her. “You do not know what frost is; you will not be able to stand it. Why have you come out of your hothouse?”

And Attalea understood that all was ended for her. She became numbed with the cold. Would it not be better to return under the roof? But she was no longer able to return. She would have to stand in the cold wind, feel its gusts and the biting touch of snowflakes. She would have to gaze at the drab sky, at beggarly Nature, at the unsavoury backyard of the botanical garden, at the huge wearisome town looming through the fog, and wait until people below in the greenhouse decided what to do with her.

The Director gave instructions to saw the palm down. “We could build a special dome over it,” he said, “but would it be for long? It would again grow up and smash everything. Besides which it would cost far too much. Saw it down.”

They fastened ropes round the palm so that when it fell it should not destroy the walls of the greenhouse, and low down at its very roots they sawed it through. The little herb which had grown around the trunk did not wish to part from its friend, and also fell under the saw. When they dragged the palm out of the greenhouse, the torn stalks and leaves spoilt by the saw fell on to the stump that remained.

“Take out all this rubbish and throw it away,” said the Director. “It has already turned yellow, and the saw has quite spoilt it. We will plant something new here.”

One of the gardeners, by a clever stroke of a hook, pulled up the bunch of herb, placed it in a basket, carried it out, and threw it into the backyard right on to the dead palm which was lying in the mud half buried by snow.

From the Reminiscences of Private Ivanoff

One beautiful June day⁠—and it was beautiful because there were twenty-eight degrees Réamur10⁠—one beautiful June day it was hot everywhere, but on a little plot in the garden, where there stood a mound of recently-mown hay, it was still hotter, because this spot was screened from any breeze by a thick, extremely thick, cherry orchard. Almost everything was sleeping. The men and women, having had their midday fill, were lying on their sides busily engaged in that profound meditation which generally follows the noonday meal. The birds were silent; even numbers of the insects were hiding from the heat, and as regards the domestic animals, “it goes without the saying.” The cattle, large and small, were taking refuge under eaves. A dog which had dug a hole under a barn had betaken himself thither, and with half-closed eyes was stretched out, breathing spasmodically, and showing nearly half an arshin11 of crimson tongue. From time to time, no doubt from boredom caused by the stifling heat, he yawned to such an extent as to give little yelps. The pigs, mamma with thirteen children, had gone off to the river, and were lying embedded in greasy black ooze, showing only a row of sniffling, grunting snouts, long dirty backs, and huge flapping ears. Only the hens, fearless of the heat, were endeavouring to kill time by scratching up the dust opposite the kitchen door, in which there was not, as they well knew, even one single tiny grain, and things must have been going very badly with one of the cocks, because from time to time he assumed a ridiculous attitude, and at the top of his voice called out: “What a scandal!”

We had come out of this plot where it was hottest of all, but a whole company of non-slumbering individuals were sitting there. That is to say, not all were sitting. The old bay horse, for instance, who, from fear for his sides of the whip wielded by the coachman, Anton, had been raking up the hay, being a horse, was quite unable to sit down. A caterpillar, the grub of some kind of butterfly, was resting on its belly rather than sitting; however, it is not a matter of words. A small but very serious gathering had assembled under a cherry-tree⁠—a snail, a beetle, a lizard, and the caterpillar already mentioned. A grasshopper also hopped up, and near by stood the old bay listening to the speeches with one bay ear lined inside with dark grey hairs turned towards them. There were also two flies sitting on the bay horse.

The gathering was politely, but quite excitedly, debating some question. As was proper, no one agreed with the other, as each highly prized the independence of his opinion and character.

“In my opinion,” said the beetle, “a properly conducted animal should first and before all busy himself about his posterity. Life is labour for the future generation. He who wittingly carries out the obligations laid upon him by Nature stands upon sure ground. He knows his business, and whatever may happen will not be answerable for the future. Look at me! Who works harder than I do? Who for whole days rolls such a heavy ball⁠—a ball made so ingeniously by me of manure for the great purpose of rendering it possible for future beetles like myself to be born? I do not think anybody could say with so calm a conscience and so clean a heart as I can when new beetles appear, ‘Yes, I have done all that I should or could have done in this world.’ That is work.”

“Go to, brother, with your work!” said an ant, which, during the beetle’s speech and notwithstanding the heat, had been dragging along a wonderful piece of dry stalk. It was resting for a moment, sitting on its four hind-legs, and with its two forelegs was wiping the perspiration from its troubled face. “I, for one, work more than you do! You work for yourself, or at all events for your species. We are not all so happily situated. You should try to drag beams along for the public, like I am doing. I myself do not know what compels me to work, exhausting my strength even in this awful heat.⁠ ⁠… No one will say thank you for it. We unhappy toiling ants, we all work, and in what way is our life beautiful? Fate.⁠ ⁠…”

“You, beetle, are too severe, and you, ant, are too pessimistic in your views of life,” broke in the grasshopper. “No, beetle, I love to chirrup and jump, and no conscience, nothing, torments or worries me. Moreover, you have not in any way touched the question put by Madame Lizard. She inquired, ‘What is the world?’ and you talk about your manure-composed balls. It is even impolite. The world in my opinion is a very nice place, because there is young grass in it for us, and sun, and breezes.⁠ ⁠… Yes, and how large it is! You here amongst these trees can have no conception of its size. When I am in a field I sometimes jump as high as I can, and I assure you I attain an enormous height. And from it I observe that the world has no limit.”

“True, true,” affirmed the bay impressively, “but none of you, however, will ever see even one-hundredth part of what I have seen in my time. I regret you cannot understand what is meant by a verst.⁠ ⁠… A verst from here is a village, Luparevka, where I go every day with a barrel for water. But they never feed me there. Then in the other direction there are Ephimovka and Kisliakovka. In Kisliakovka there is a church with bells. Then farther on there is Sviato-Troiska, and then Bogoiavlensk. In Bogoiavlensk they always give me hay, only it is of poor quality. But, Nicolaieff! that is a town for you⁠—twenty-eight versts from here⁠—there the hay is better, and they give you oats. However, I do not care about going there. Our master goes there sometimes, and orders the coachman to hurry up, and the coachman hits us in a most painful manner with the whip.⁠ ⁠… Then there is also Alexandrovka, Bielozerk, and Cherson, also a town⁠ ⁠… only how can you understand all this! That is the world; not all, we will admit, but nevertheless a considerable portion of it.”

The bay stopped speaking, but his lower lip continued to quiver as if he was still whispering something. This was due to old age. He was seventeen years old, which age for a horse is what seventy-seven years of age would be to a man.

“I do not understand your sagacious, equine remarks, and will not bother to try and understand, but will accept them,” said the snail. “As long as there is burdock for me it is sufficient. I have now been four days crawling on this plant, and I have not finished yet. And after this burdock is finished there is another, and in it I am sure a snail is sitting. And that’s all. To jump is not necessary⁠—that is all imagination and frivolity; sit and eat the leaf on which you are resting. If I had not been lazy in crawling I should long ago have gone away from you and your arguments. One’s head aches from them, and nothing more.”

“No; allow me to tell you why,” interrupted the grasshopper. “It is so pleasing to chirrup a little, especially on such entrancing subjects as infinity, etc. Of course, there are practical natures which only trouble about how best to fill their insides, such as you or this beautiful caterpillar.”

“Ah no, leave me in peace; I implore you, leave me in peace, and out of the question; do not bother about me,” querulously cried the caterpillar. “I am doing this for the future life, only for the future life.”

“What sort of a future life?” inquired the bay.

“Can it be you do not know that after death I become a butterfly with multicoloured wings?”

The bay, lizard, and snail did not know this, but the insects had a kind of glimmering knowledge on the subject. And all kept silent for a short time, because no one knew how to say anything to the point respecting the future life.

“It is necessary to treat strong convictions with respect,” chirruped the grasshopper at length. “Does no one wish to say anything more? Perhaps you ladies?” and he turned to the flies. The elder of them answered:

“We cannot say that things have gone badly with us. We have just come from a room where the ‘gude wife’ was potting jam, and we settled under a lid and had our fill. We are satisfied. It is true our mamma got entangled in the jam, but what is to be done? She had already lived a considerable time in the world, and we are satisfied.”

“Gentlemen,” said the lizard, “I am of the opinion that you are all entirely correct! But, on the other hand.⁠ ⁠…”

But the lizard did not state what was on the other hand, because she felt something firmly press her tail into the ground.

This was the coachman, Anton, who, having awakened, had come for the bay. He had unwittingly placed his huge foot on the assemblage and squashed it. Only the flies escaped, and flew away to buzz of their deceased mother departed in the jam. The lizard escaped, but with a reduced tail. Anton took the bay by the forelock, and led him out of the garden to harness him up to the barrel, and go for water, and said to him, “Get on, you old stump!” to which the bay only replied by whispering something to himself. The lizard remained without a tail. True it is that after a while it grew again, but it always remained somewhat blunted and blackish in colour, and whenever she was asked how she had damaged her tail, she used to reply:

“They tore it off because I dared to express my convictions.”

And she was quite correct.

The Bears

In the Steppe the town of Bielsk nestles on the River Rokhla at a point where it makes several sharp curves linked up by branch streams, the whole forming a network which, if looked at on a clear summer day from the lofty right bank of the channel through which the river runs here, resembles a gigantic bow of blue ribbon. At this point the bank rises some three hundred and fifty feet sheer above the level of the river as if it had been cut by a huge knife. So steep is it that to clamber from the water’s edge to the top, where the limitless Steppe commences, is possible only by taking hold of the bushes of spindlewood, birch, and hazel thickly covering the face of the slope. From this summit a clear view of forty versts opens out on every side. On the right to the south and on the left to the north stretch the gradients of the right bank of the Rokhla, descending abruptly into valleys such as the one from above which we are gazing. Some of the ridges show up white with their chalk tops and naked sides destitute of soil. Others are covered for the most part with short and withered grass. In front to the east stretches the illimitable undulating Steppe, yellow with haystacks, over which some useless weed is growing thickly, or verdant with growing crops, here showing the dark purple-black of newly upturned fallow, there the silvery grey of feather-grass. Viewed from where we are standing, the Steppe appears level, and only the accustomed eye can trace on it the scarcely discernible lines of ridges, of invisible ravines and gullies. Here and there an old half-sunken tumulus meets the view, its sides scarified by the plough, and no longer possessed of its stone slab, now perhaps adorning the courtyard of the Kharkoff University, or perhaps taken away by some peasant, and now forming part of the wall of his cattle-yard.

Below, the winding river runs from north to south, alternately receding from its high bank into the Steppe or flowing immediately under its ledge, fringed at intervals with clusters of pine-trees and about the town by gardens and grazing-plots. At some distance from the bank to the side of the Steppe a strip of quicksand runs almost the entire length of the river, barely supporting the red and black shoots of small shrubs growing on it, and its thick carpet of fragrant lilac-coloured charbrets. Amongst these sands, two versts from the town, lies the cemetery, resembling from a distance a little oasis with the small wooden bell-tower of the cemetery chapel rising from its centre. The town itself presents no outstanding features, and is much like all district towns, apart from the astonishing cleanliness of its streets, due not so much to a solicitous municipal administration as to the sandy soil on which the town is built, which absorbs any moisture an incensed heaven may pour forth, and thereby places the town swine in great difficulties, compelling them to seek suitable accommodation for themselves at least two versts distance from the town in the dirty banks of the river.

In September of 1857 the town of Bielsk was in a state of unwonted excitement. The usual routine of life was disturbed. Everywhere, whether in the Club, streets, or on the benches outside the gateway entrances of courtyards, indoors and outdoors, animated conversation was being carried on. It might have been supposed that the Zemstvo elections, which were taking place at this time, were the cause of disturbance; but there had been previous Zemstvo elections, and with all their scandals they had never produced any special impression on the native of Bielsk. On these occasions, if meeting in the street, the citizens would merely exchange brief remarks with each other.

“Have you been?” one would ask, indicating by a glance the building in which the Zemstvo ofhces were housed.

“Yes,” would reply the other, with a gesture of his hand; and, accustomed to this mode of expression of thoughts, the interrogator would understand and simply add:

“Who?”

“Ivan Petrovich.”

“Whom?”

“Ivan Parfenovich.”

Then they would both smile and part.

But now it was quite different. The town was in an uproar just as at fair-time. Crowds of urchins kept running backwards and forwards in the direction of the town common grazing-ground. Respectable, sober individuals in loose summer suits of alpaca silk were also wending their way thither, and the damsels of the town, with parasols and various coloured hoop-petticoats (they wore them in those days), occupying so much of the wide street that young Rogacheff, the merchant, driving a dapple grey, was obliged to draw in almost against the walls of the houses. The ladies were accompanied by the local cavaliers in grey overcoats with black velvet collars, carrying walking-canes and wearing straw hats or caps with cockades. Among these beaux were, of course, the brothers Isotoff, the leaders of all public gaieties, who knew how during a quadrille to call out “Grand Rond!” and “Au rebours!”⁠—that is, when they were not running through the town imparting the latest news to their lady acquaintances.

“They have arrived from the Valuinsk District, and occupy half the ground of the Common right up to the river,” said Leonid, the elder brother.

“I regarded the view from the summit of the eminence,” added Constantine, the younger brother, who delighted in expressing himself in the most flowery language⁠—“an entrancing picture!”

“Eminence” was the name he gave to the hill from which a view of the town and its vicinity could be obtained.

“Ah, what a good idea! Listen! I have a splendid idea. Let us order the lineika, and drive out to the eminence. It will be like a picnic, and we will watch from there.”

This proposal by the first lady of Bielsk, the wife of the brother of the Treasurer (almost the whole town called her husband, Paul Ivanovich, the brother of the Treasurer), who had arrived eight years ago from Petersburg, and was therefore the authority on fashions and good tone, met with general approval. The fat old bay horse was harnessed into the lineika, which is only met with in provincial capitals, and consists of long boards with two long seats so placed that the occupants, usually twelve in all, sit in two rows of six or seven a side and back to back. The party, which consisted of some dozen persons, seated themselves in the lineika, and started off through the town, overtaking mobs of boys, strings of damsels, and crowds of every description of public, all making their way to the Common. The lineika, having negotiated the sandy streets of the town, crossed the bridge and made for the steep right bank of the river. The bay, with dogged pace, wrinkling the sleek folds of his glossy haunches, clambered up the long slope, and in half an hour the picnickers were seated on the edge of the three hundred feet high ridge, with its overgrowth of bushes, gazing at the view with which we are already acquainted. Below, under their feet, immediately under this wall, the river was quietly flowing along its course, and behind it opened out the common on which the general attention was concentrated.

In the variety of colouring it resembled a huge patchwork carpet. The dull white of tents, numberless vehicles, and a motley crowd were all visible. Dark figures of men in kaftans and dirty grey shirts intermingled with the bright yellow and scarlet dresses of the women. A dense crowd surrounded the gipsy encampment which had been formed. It was a magnificent day, not too hot, and absolutely still. Above the roar of a multitudinous crowd could be heard the ring of sledgehammers on iron, the neighing of horses, and the roar of scores of tame bears⁠—the mainstay of the gipsies who had brought them hither out of the neighbouring Districts.

Olga Pavlona gazed at this kaleidoscope through binoculars, and went into raptures.

“How interesting it all is! What a big one! Look, Leonid, what a huge bear there on the right! And the young gipsy alongside it⁠—a perfect Adonis!”

She handed the glasses to the young man, who through them saw the figure of a well-built and exceedingly dirty youth who was standing near and petting a beast which kept shuffling about and changing from one leg on to another.

“Allow me to look,” said a stout, clean-shaven man in a duck suit and straw hat. For some time he looked attentively through the glasses, and then, turning to Olga Pavlona, said with a deep sigh: “Ye-es, Olga Pavlona, an Adonis. But this Adonis will turn out a first-class horse-thief.”

Olga Pavlona uttered an exclamation of impatience.

“Why,” said she, “do you always try to turn everything poetical into prose? Why a horse-thief? I will not believe it! He looks so good!”

“That may be, but how is he going to support his beautiful body without that bear? Tomorrow they are slaughtering all these bears, and one-half of all the gipsies in this encampment will be without a living.”

“They can work as blacksmiths and shoeing-smiths, tell fortunes⁠ ⁠…”

“Tell fortunes! Ilia, the horse-doctor, came to me yesterday. You go and talk with him. ‘Thomas Thomasovich,’ he said, ‘those greys of yours are very good, only beware of our brother.’ ‘What!’ I said; ‘surely you will not steal them?’ He smiled, the blackguard! Tell fortunes! Those are the sort of fortunes he is telling!”

Out of the lineika they took a large basket, from which appeared eatables and drinks, and the company began to seat themselves in groups, chatting merrily the while, and scarcely paying any attention to the picture displayed at their feet. The sun had set, and the gigantic shadow of the height quickly spread to the Common, town, and Steppe. Outlines softened, and, as happens in the South, day was quickly replaced by night. Lights began to flicker in the town, and fires were lighted in the camp, which showed up redly through the mist rising from the slumbering river below, the distant bends of which glistened in the cold moonlight. And above the river, on the height itself, Constantine and Leonid kept up a ceaseless flow of ridiculous stories, at which Olga Pavlona occasionally smiled with condescension, and the younger ladies of the party giggled or even laughed aloud. Candles protected by glass shades were lighted, and the coachman with the maid prepared the samovar in the bushes near by⁠—a process apparently necessitating occasional, but at the same time very cautious, squeaks on the part of the maid. Portly Thomas Thomasovich alone remained silent, and finally interrupted Leonid at the most interesting point of one of his anecdotes.

“When, then, have they finally decided to have this slaughter of bears?” said he.

“Wednesday morning,” said the brothers Isotoff simultaneously.

The unhappy gipsies had journeyed hither from four Districts of the Government with all their household effects, horses, bears, etc. More than a hundred of these awkward beasts, ranging from tiny cubs to huge “old men” whose coats had become grey or whitish from age, had collected on the town common. The gipsies awaited the fatal day with terror. Those who had been the first to arrive had already been encamped here more than a fortnight. The Authorities were waiting until all should arrive, so that the business of killing the bears might be carried out in one day and finished with once and for all. The gipsies had been given five years’ grace from the publication of the Order prohibiting performing bears, and now this period had expired. They were now to appear at specified places and themselves destroy their supporters.

They had completed their last round through the villages with the familiar goat and big drum⁠—the invariable companions of the bears. For the last time, having espied them afar off coming down from the Steppe into the steep gully and bank of the river, the usual site of Little Russian villages, a crowd of boys and girls had run a verst to meet them, returning triumphantly with them, a confused rabble, back to the village, where the fun of the fair had already commenced. And what fun it was! What festivities took place! They would halt by the inn or some bigger house, or if it was an estate before the proprietor’s house, and begin their performances, cures, trade, barter, fortune-telling, horseshoeing, and repairs of wagons, continuing right throughout the long summer day until the evening, when the gipsies would leave the village for the cattle-grazing ground, and, setting up their tents or simply stretching the canvas over the shafts of the wagons, would light their fires and prepare supper, whilst far into the night an inquisitive crowd would stand around the encampment.

“Come along now; it is time to go home,” my father would say to me, a little boy, but no less unwilling to leave, would wait in response to my entreaties for “just a little longer⁠—a little longer.” Together we would sit in the cart, the old horse Vasia, with his head turned towards the fires and ears pricked towards the bears, standing quietly, save for an occasional snort. The fires of the camp cast dancing red lights and vague trembling shadows. A light mist was rising from the ravine to the side of us, whilst behind the camp stretched the Steppe. The dark wings of a windmill stood out as if painted against the sky, and behind it was limitless mysterious space enfolded in a silvery twilight. Amidst the din of the encampment could be heard those subdued sounds so characteristic of the Steppe at night. First from some distant pond would come the solemn reverberating chorus of frogs, then the regular but hurried chirrup of the grasshopper and the cry of the quail. Again, faint, indistinguishable harmonious sounds would be wafted to our ears⁠—mayhap the sound of some distant bell borne on the breeze, or the voice of Nature, whose tongue we do not understand.

But in the encampment all is becoming quiet. Gradually fires are extinguished. The bears under the carts to which they are tethered growl deeply from time to time, as with a jingling of their chains they restlessly change their position. Their owners, too, are settling down to sleep. One of them in an uncultivated tenor is singing a strange song in his native language, unlike the songs of Moscow restaurant gipsies and operatic singers⁠—a song characteristic, wild, mournful, strange to the ear. No one knows when it was composed, what Steppe, forest or mountain gave it birth. It has remained a living testimony of a land forgotten even by those who sing it now under the burning stars of a foreign sky and in alien Steppes.

“Come along,” says my father. Vasia bravely starts, and the droshky wends its way along the winding road below into the valley. A thin dust rises half-heartedly from under the wheels, and then, as if also overcome with sleep, falls back on to the dewy grass.

“Papa, does anyone know gipsy?”

“The gipsies themselves, of course, do, but I have never met others who could speak to them.”

“I should like to learn it. I should like to know what he was singing about. Papa, are they heathens? Perhaps he was singing about his gods, how they lived and fought.”

We arrive home, and as I lie under the coverlet my imagination still works and forms strange fancies in the little head already on the pillow.

Now, bears no longer wander through the villages, and even the gipsies themselves seldom wander. The greater number of them live where they have been told to live, and only occasionally pay tribute to their century-old instincts, select some common, stretch their smoky canvas, and live whole families together, busy with the shoeing of horses, horse-curing, and dealing. I have even seen how tents have given place to hastily erected wooden shelters. This was in the provincial capital not far from the hospital and the fairground, on a piece of land as yet unbuilt on and running alongside the main road. On this plot the gipsies had built quite a little town. Only the swarthy faces, quick-glancing eyes, curly hair, and dirty clothes of the men, with the equally dirty, gaudy rags of the women and the naked bronzed children, reminded me of the former picture of a wandering gipsy encampment. The clang of iron was coming from these shelters, and I looked into one of them. An old man was making horseshoes. I looked at his work, and saw that this man was no longer a gipsy blacksmith, but an ordinary workman who had taken some order, and was working as quickly as possible to finish it so as to take up a new job. He was forging shoe after shoe, throwing them one after another into a heap in a corner of the shanty. He was working with a gloomy concentrated air, and at a great rate. This was in the daytime. Going past late that night, I went up to the shelter, and saw the old man still at the same work. It was a factory. And it was strange to see a gipsy encampment almost in the heart of the town situated between the Zemstvo hospital, the bazaar, and some kind of enclosed square where soldiers were being drilled, and from which came the sound of sharp orders given by the instructors. It was alongside a road from which the wind was raising clouds of dust, smothering with it the boarded shelters and the fires with their pots, in which the womenkind, their heads adorned with gaudy handkerchiefs, were boiling some sort of gruel.

They had gone through the villages giving their shows for the last time. For the last time the bears had displayed their histrionic talents, had danced, wrestled, showed how little boys steal the peas, imitated the mincing step of the young girl and the waddling gait of the old woman. For the last time they had received their reward in the form of a tumbler of vodka, which the bear, standing on its hind-legs, would seize with both front paws, place against his shaggy muzzle, and, throwing his head back, pour the contents down his throat, after which he would lick his jaws and express his satisfaction in a quiet rumble and strange deep sighs. For the last time old men and women were coming to the gipsies to be cured of their ailments by the true and tried process of lying on the ground under a bear, which would place his belly on the patient, spread himself out on all fours, and remain in this position until the gipsies considered the séance had lasted long enough. For the last time they had entered huts, when, if the bear voluntarily entered, he was led into the front portion of the dwelling, and all sat there and rejoiced at his graciousness as a good omen, but if, in spite of all entreaties and caresses he refused to cross the threshold, the occupants would be sorrowful, and their neighbours would shake their heads. The greater part of the gipsies had come from the Western Districts, so that they were obliged to descend into Bielsk by a long hill nearly two versts long, and, seeing from a distance the site of their coming misfortune⁠—this little town with its thatched and iron roofs and two or three bell-towers⁠—the women commenced to wail, the children to cry, and the bears from sympathy, or perhaps⁠—who knows?⁠—understanding from their masters the bitter fate in store for them, to roar in such a way that carts which met them turned aside from the road so that the bullocks and horses should not be frightened, whilst the dogs with yelps of alarm crawled under the carts, taking refuge behind the grease and tar-pots which the peasants of these parts fasten under the body of their carts.

Several of the old men amongst the gipsies had collected at the entrance gates of the house in which the ispravnik of Bielsk resided. They had decked themselves out so as to present a respectable appearance before the Authorities. All wore black or dark blue under-tunics, and belts brocaded with silver and black enamel-work, silk shirts having a narrow piping of gold lace round the collar, plush trousers, high boots which in some cases were embroidered and slashed with a pattern, and the majority wore astrachan caps. This dress was worn only on the most solemn occasions.

“Is he asleep?” inquired a tall, upright gipsy, tanned from age, of a gorodovoi who came out of the courtyard⁠—one of the eleven gorodovois entrusted with the preservation of law and order in the town of Bielsk.

“He is getting up⁠—is dressing. He will send for you soon,” replied the gorodovoi.

The old men, who up till now had been sitting or standing motionless, began to move and to speak in low tones amongst themselves. The senior of them drew something out of the pocket of his baggy trousers; the remainder all collected around him and looked at the object which he held in his hands.

“Nothing will come of it,” he said at last. “What, indeed, can he do? It is not his doing. It is the Minister at Petersburg who has given the order. They are killing the bears everywhere.”

“We will try, Ivan. Perhaps he can do something,” said another of the old men.

“Of course we can try,” replied Ivan dismally. “Only he will take our money and will not help in any way.”

The ispravnik sent for them. They went in a crowd into the entrance-hall, and when he came out to them⁠—a whiskered man in an unbuttoned police uniform, which exposed a red silk shirt⁠—the old men fell at his feet. They implored his assistance, offered him money, and many of them wept.

“Your Worship,” said Ivan, “will himself judge what is to happen to us. What will become of us? We had bears; we lived quietly, insulted no one. Amongst us are young men who engage in evil work, but are there not horse-thieves amongst the Russians? No one was insulted by our beasts, Your Worship; they amused all. Now what is going to happen to us, Your Worship? We must go into the world, and if not thieves, must be vagabonds. Our fathers, our grandfathers, Your Worship, led bears around. We do not know how to plough the land; we are all blacksmiths. It has been hard work travelling the wide world over as blacksmiths in search of work, and now work will not come of itself to us. Our young men will become horse-thieves⁠—nothing else to do, Your Worship. Before God I speak frankly, concealing nothing. A great evil has been done us and good people by taking away our bears from us. Perhaps you will help us. God will reward you for it. Kind sir, help us!”

The old man fell on his knees and prostrated himself at the feet of the ispravnik. The others followed suit. The Major stood with a gloomy expression on his face, smoothing his long moustaches with one hand and the other thrust into the pocket of his dark blue overalls.

The old man pulled out a bulging pocketbook and offered it to him.

“I will not take it,” said the ispravnik surlily. “I can do nothing.”

“But if you will take it, Your Worship,” said the crowd, “perhaps something⁠—if you would write.”

“I will not take it,” repeated the ispravnik more loudly than before. “On no account. It is useless. It is the law. You were given five years’ grace. What can be done?” And he made a motion with his hands. The old men remained silent. The ispravnik continued: “I know what a misfortune this is for all of you⁠—and to us. Now we shall have to look out for our horses, but what can I do? You, old man, put away your money. I will not take it. If I have to give you trouble through your children over horses do not be angry with me, but to take money for nothing is not one of my customs. Put it away⁠—put it away, old man; your money will be useful to you.”

“Your Worship,” said Ivan, still holding the pocketbook in his hands, “be so good as to give the order for the slaughter. Please tomorrow”⁠—the old man’s voice trembled⁠—“please tomorrow finish it. We are tired, worn out. Two weeks ago I came here with mine. We have lived quite⁠—”

“There is still one lot to come in, old man,” broke in the ispravnik. “We must wait. It must be done all at one time, and finished. The whole town has gone off its head over you all.”

“They have arrived already, Your Worship. As we came to Your Excellency they were coming down the hill. Do us this kindness, sir. Do not torment us!”

“Well, if they have arrived, then tomorrow at ten o’clock I will come to you. Have you guns?”

“We have guns, but not all of us.”

“All right, I will tell the Colonel to lend you some rifles. God be with you! I am sorry, very sorry for you all!”

The old men turned towards the door, but the ispravnik called them back.

“Wait a moment,” he said. “I will tell you something. Go to the chemist’s shop next to the church. Go and say I sent you. The chemist will buy all the bears’-fat from you; he will make it into pomade. Perhaps he will buy the skins, too. He will give you a good price. He will not lose by it.”

The gipsies thanked him, and in a crowd trooped off to the chemist’s shop. Their hearts were torn; almost without bargaining they sold the mortal remains of their old friends. Thomas Thomasovich bought all the fat at fourteen kopecks a pood, and promised to speak about the skins later on. The young merchant, Rogacheff, who happened to be there, bought all the bear-hams at five kopecks a pound, hoping to make a good deal out of the transaction.

In the evening of that day the brothers Isotoff rushed breathless to the house of the brother of the Treasurer.

“Olga Pavlona! Olga Pavlona! they have settled it for tomorrow! All have arrived! The Colonel has already given out the rifles!” they shouted, vying against each other in their haste to tell the news. “Thomas Thomasovich has bought all the fat at fourteen kopecks a pood, and Rogacheff the hams, and⁠—”

“Stop, stop, Leonid!” interrupted Olga Pavlona. “Why has Thomas Thomasovich bought the fat?”

“For ointment, pomade. It is a splendid thing for making the hair grow.” And forthwith Constantine related an interesting anecdote of how a certain bald gentleman, through rubbing his head with bears’-fat, even grew hair on his hands.

“And he was forced to shave them every two days,” added Leonid; and then the two brothers burst out laughing.

Olga Pavlona smiled and pondered over the news. She had long worn a chignon, and this information about bears’-grease interested her very much. When that same evening Thomas Thomasovich came round to play cards with her husband and the Treasurer, she cleverly succeeded in making him promise to send her some bears’ ointment.

“Of course⁠—of course, Olga Pavlona,” he had said, “and it shall be scented. Which do you prefer⁠—patchouli or ylang-ylang?”

The day broke cloudy and cold⁠—a genuine September day⁠—with an occasional slight drizzle, but this notwithstanding, numbers of both sexes and of all ages went to the Common to see the interesting spectacle. The town was almost deserted. All the vehicles the town boasted of⁠—one carriage, several phaetons, droshkies, and lineikas⁠—were engaged in taking out the curious. They left them at the encampment, and returned for fresh loads. By ten o’clock all were already out there.

The gipsies had lost all hopes. There was not much noise in the camp. The women were hiding in the tents with the little ones, so as not to see the massacre, and only occasionally a despairing wail was wrung from one or another of them. The men were feverishly making the last preparations. They had dragged the wagons to the edge of the camping-ground, and had tied the bears to them.

The ispravnik, with Thomas Thomasovich, passed along the rows of condemned. The bears themselves were not altogether calm. The unusual surroundings, the strange preparations, the enormous crowd, the large number of bears collected together⁠—all this had excited them, and they tugged or gnawed at their chains, uttering occasional low growls. Old Ivan stood near his enormous bear crooked with age. His son, an elderly gipsy whose black hair was already streaked with silvery grey, and his grandson⁠—that same Adonis whom Olga Pavlona had noticed⁠—with ghastly faces and burning eyes were hastily tying up the bear.

The ispravnik came up level with the trio.

“Well, old man,” said he, “tell them to commence.”

A wave of excited expectation passed over the crowd of onlookers, conversation redoubled, but soon after all became quiet, and amidst a profound silence was heard a low but authoritative voice. Old Ivan was speaking.

“Allow me, sir, to speak.” Then, turning to his fellow-gipsies, he continued: “Comrades, I beg you to let me be the first to finish. I am older than any of you. Next year I shall have seen ninety years. I have led bears from my infancy, and in the whole camp there is no bear older than mine.”

He lowered his grey curly head on to his chest, shaking it sorrowfully from side to side, and wiped his eyes with his fist. Then he drew himself up, raised his head, and continued in a louder, firmer voice than before:

“Therefore I want to be the first. I thought I should not live to see such grief. I thought⁠—that my bear, my loved one, would not live, but apparently Fate has willed otherwise. With my own hand I must kill him, my provider and benefactor. Loose him; let him be free. He will not go away; he, as with us old men, will not flee from death. Loose him, Vasia! I do not wish to kill him bound, as they kill cattle. Do not be afraid,” said he, turning to the crowd, which showed signs of alarm; “he will not move.”

The youth freed the huge beast, and led him a short distance away from the wagon. The bear sat on his haunches, letting his front paws hang loosely, and swayed from side to side, breathing heavily and hoarsely. He was very old, his teeth were yellow, his coat had grown a reddish colour and was falling out. He gazed in a friendly but melancholy manner at his old master with his one small eye. All around was an absolute silence, broken only by the noise of the ramrods against the barrels of the rifles as the wads were pressed home.

“Give me the gun,” said the old man firmly.

His son gave him the rifle. He took it, and, pressing the muzzle against the old animal’s breast, again began to address the bear:

“I am going to kill thee in a minute, Potap. God grant that my old hand may not tremble, and that the bullet may find its way into thy very heart. I do not want to torture thee. Thou dost not deserve such, my old bear, my good, my kind old mate. I caught thee a little cub. One of thy eyes had gone, thy nose was rotting from the ring, thou wert suffering from consumption. I tended thee as a son, and pitied thee, and thou grew up a big and powerful bear. There is not such another in all the camps which have collected here. And thou grew up and did not forget my kindness. Never have I had such a friend amongst men such as thou hast been. Thou hast been kind and quiet and clever, and hast learnt all. Never have I seen a beast kinder, more clever than thou. What would I have been without thee? My whole family have lived by thy labour. Thou hast bought me two troikas. It was thou who built me a hut for the winter. Thou hast done yet more for me. Thou saved my son from being a soldier. Ours is a large family, but all, from the oldest to the youngest, thou hast supported up till now. And I have loved thee greatly, and have not beaten thee too much, and if I have in any way offended against thee, forgive me. At thy feet I bow.”

He threw himself at the bear’s feet. The beast quietly and plaintively growled. The old man lay on the ground, his whole body quivering convulsed with sobs.

“Shoot, daddy,” said his son. “Do not tear our hearts!”

Ivan rose. The tears no longer flowed. He threw back the grey mane which had fallen over his brow, and continued in a steady, resounding voice:

“And now I must kill thee. They have ordered me, an old man, to shoot thee with my own hands. Thou must no longer live on this earth. Why? May God in Heaven judge us!”

He cocked the trigger, and with a firm, steady hand aimed at the beast’s heart under the left paw. And the beast understood. A pitiful, heartrending sound broke from the bear. He stood up on his hind-legs, and raised his forepaws as if to hide his face with them from the terrifying gun. A wail went up from the gipsies; in the crowd many were openly crying. With a sob the old man threw aside the rifle, and fell senseless to the ground. His son rushed forward to pick him up, and the grandson seized the gun.

“It must be,” he cried in a wild, hysterical voice, with blazing eyes. “Enough! Shoot, comrades; let us end it!” And, running up to the beast, he placed the muzzle of the rifle against the bear’s ear and fired. The bear fell to the ground a lifeless mass. Only his paws moved convulsively, and his jaw dropped as if yawning. Throughout the encampment rang out shots and the despairing cries of the women and children. A light breeze carried the smoke towards the river.

“One has got loose⁠—broken loose!” resounded through the crowd, and, like a flock of frightened sheep, all rushed helter-skelter. The ispravnik, fat Thomas Thomasovich, urchins, Leonid and Constantine, young ladies⁠—all fled, panic-stricken, running into the tents, against the carts and wagons, screeching and falling over each other.

Olga Pavlona almost fainted, but fear gave her strength, and, picking up her petticoats, she fled along the Common, regardless of the disordered state of her costume caused by such hasty flight. The horses, harnessed up in anticipation of the return of their owners to town, commenced to get out of control, and bolted in various directions. But the danger was by no means great. A still quite young brown bear, maddened by fright, with a broken chain hanging from his neck, was running away with astonishing rapidity. Everyone and everything made way in front of him, and, like the wind, he fled straight into the town. Some of the gipsies, rifles in hand, were running after him. The few pedestrians who chanced to be in the streets pressed themselves against the walls if too late to take refuge in gateways. Shutters were bolted, everything living hid, even the dogs disappeared.

Past the church went the bear, and up the main street, sometimes rushing to one or other side as if seeking a place in which to hide, but everywhere was bolted. As he flashed past the shops he was met with fiendish cries from the shopmen and boys who wished to frighten him. He fled past the bank, the school, and barracks, to the other end of the town, rushed along the road leading to the bank of the river, and stopped. His pursuers were outdistanced. But soon after a crowd, no longer composed of gipsies only, appeared from the street. The ispravnik and the Colonel were in a droshky with rifles in their hands. The gipsies and a squad of soldiers were following behind them at the double. Alongside the droshky ran Leonid and Const antine.

“There he is! there he is!” cried out the ispravnik. “The deuce take him!”

A volley of shots followed. One of the bullets grazed the bear, and in mortal fright he fled faster than ever. A verst from the town, up the Rokhla, whither the bear was running, is a large water-mill, surrounded on all sides by a small but thick wood. The animal made for this wood, but, becoming confused in the branches of the river and the dams, lost his way. A wide expanse of water separated him from the dense overgrowth, where he could perhaps find, if not safety, at least respite. But he decided not to swim. On this side there was a species of bush which grows thickly, and is only found in Southern Russia. Its long, supple, branchless stalks grow so closely together that it is impossible for anyone to make his way through it, but at its roots there are corners and bare patches into which dogs can crawl, and as they often do this to escape from the heat when the weather is warm, and widen the paths leading to them by the pressure of their flanks on the bushes, a whole labyrinth of passages is formed. It was into this undergrowth the bear rushed. The mill men, who were watching from the upper story of the mill, saw this, and when the breathless, exhausted chase arrived, the ispravnik ordered the bear’s hiding-place to be surrounded.

The unfortunate animal forced its way into the very depth of the bushes. The wound made by the bullet was very painful. He rolled himself into a ball, buried his muzzle in his paws, and lay motionless, deafened by the noise, mad with fright, and deprived of the possibility of defending himself. The soldiers fired into the bushes, hoping by chance to touch him and make him roar, but to hit, firing at random, is difficult. They killed him late that evening, having smoked him out of his shelter by setting fire to the bushes. Everyone who had a rifle thought it his bounden duty to plant a bullet into the dying beast, so that when they skinned it the skin was useless.

Not long ago I chanced to be in Bielsk. The town has scarcely changed. Only the bank has smashed, and the school is now larger and of a higher grade. They have changed the ispravnik, who was given promotion as pristav in a provincial capital for zealous service. The brothers Isotoff, as of old, shout “Grand rond!” and “Au rebours!” and run about the town relating the last piece of gossip. The chemist, Thomas Thomasovich, has grown even fatter, and notwithstanding that he made a good thing out of the purchase of the bears’-fat at fourteen kopecks per pound by selling it at eighty kopecks, which brought him in all no small sum, even now speaks with disapproval of the slaughter of the bears.

“I said then to Olga Pavlona that through it her Adonis would become a horse-thief⁠ ⁠… and what happened? Less than a week afterwards he stole my pair of greys, the blackguard!”

“And do you know it was he who stole them?”

“Who else could it have been? Last year they tried him for horse-stealing and robbery. He was sent to penal servitude.”

“Ah, how sorry I was for him!” said Olga Pavlona sorrowfully.

The poor lady has grown decidedly older these last years, and notwithstanding the fact, according to Thomas Thomasovich, who told me in confidence, that she has smeared her head with four pounds of bears’-grease, her hair has not only not become thicker, but even grown thinner. But her chignon hides it so well that it is absolutely unnoticeable.

The Scarlet Blossom

A Toad and a Rose

Once upon a time in this world there lived a rose and a toad.

The bush on which the rose bloomed grew in a not very big crescent-shaped flowerbed in front of a country house in a village. The flowerbed was in a very neglected state. Grass and weeds grew thickly over its sunken surface, and along the paths, which no one had cleaned or sprinkled with sand for a long time. A wooden trellis, which had once been painted green, was now quite bare of any such decoration, had rotted, and was falling to pieces. Most of the long stakes of which the trellis-work was composed had been pulled up by the boys of the village for playing at soldiers, or by peasants coming to the house to defend themselves from a savage yard-dog.

But the flowerbed itself was none the worse for this desolation. Climbing hop tendrils entwined themselves amongst the debris of the trellis-work, mingling with the large white flowers of convolvuli. Broom hung from it in pale green clusters, dotted with lilac-tinted bunches of bloom. Prickly thistles grew so freely in the rich moist soil (the flowerbed was surrounded by a large shady garden), that they almost resembled trees. Yellow mullen raised blossom-covered shoots even higher. Nettles had taken possession of a whole corner of the bed. Of course they stung, but, from a distance, one could admire their dark foliage, especially when this foliage served as a background for the delicate, lovely pale blossom of a rose.

It burst into bloom on a beautiful May morning. When it had opened its petals, the early dew, before taking flight, had left on them a few transparent teardrops, which made it look as if the rose was weeping. But all around was so beautiful, so clean and bright on this glorious morning when the rose first saw the blue sky and felt the caress of the morning zephyr, and the rays of a brilliant sun, giving a pinkish tint to its thin petals. All in the flowerbed was so peaceful and calm that had the rose really been able to cry, it would not have been from grief, but from the very joy of living. It could not talk; it could only diffuse around, with lowered head, a delicate fresh perfume, and this perfume was at once its words, tears, and prayers. But below it, amongst the roots of the rosebush on the damp soil, as if glued to it by its flat belly, there sat a decidedly fat old toad, which used to hunt all night for worms and midges, and when morning came, would sit and rest from his labours, having first chosen the shadiest and dampest spot. He used to sit there, his toad’s eyes, with their membranous lids, tightly closed, his scarcely perceptible breathing expanding his dirty-grey barbed and sticky sides, with one shapeless paw outstretched, too lazy to tuck it in. He was not rejoicing either in the brilliant morning sun or the beautiful weather. He had fed and meant to have a rest. But when the breeze chanced to die away for a minute, and the perfume of the rose was not borne to one side, the toad noticed it, and this caused him a vague uneasiness. However, for a long time he was too lazy to look and see whence this scent was coming.

It was a long time since anyone had come to the bed in which the rose was growing and the toad used to sit. In the autumn of the past year, on the very day that the toad, having discovered an excellent chink under one of the stones forming the basement of the house, had decided to take up his winter quarters therein, a small boy had come for the last time to this flowerbed in which he had sat every fine day throughout the summer. A lady, his grownup sister, used to sit at the window reading or sewing, and from time to time used to look at her brother. He was a little fellow of seven, with large eyes and a large head on a thin little body. He was very fond of his flowerbed. It was his because only he used to go to this deserted part of the garden, and he would sit in the sunshine on a little old wooden seat standing on a dry, once-sanded path, which ran round the house itself, and along which servants used to go to shut the shutters, and he would commence to read the book he had brought with him.

“Vasia, shall I throw you your ball?” his sister would call out. “Perhaps you would like to play with it?”

“No, Masha, I am better like this with my book.”

And he would sit for a long time and read. Then, when he was tired of reading about Robinson Crusoes, savage countries, and pirates, he would leave his book open on the seat and clamber into the thick of his flowerbed. He knew every bush, almost every stalk in it. He would squat on his heels before the thick stem of some shrub covered with rough, whitish leaves, three times as tall as himself, and look for hours at the world of ants hurrying up to their cows⁠—green insects⁠—and note how delicately the ants tapped the thin pipes sticking out along the backs of these insects, and collected the pure drops of sweet liquid which is at the end of these pipes. He would watch the dung beetle busily and zealously rolling its ball somewhere. He would mark own a spider which, having woven his clever rainbow-like web, was sitting on guard for flies, or a lizard basking in the sun, with its blunt little jaws open, and its back shining with little green scales. One evening he actually saw a hedgehog. He could scarcely restrain his delight, and almost shouted and clapped his hands, but, afraid of frightening the prickly little “beastie,” he held his breath, and, with eyes dilated with joy, watched in ecstasies how, giving little grunts, it sniffed with its pig-shaped snout at the roots of the rosebush, looking for worms, and how absurdly it went along with its fat little paws so ridiculously like a bear’s.

“Vasia, dear, come along in now; it is getting damp!” his sister called out loudly.

And the hedgehog, frightened at the sound of a human voice, quickly pulled his prickly shuba over his head and hind paws, turning himself into a ball. The boy quietly touched its prickles, and the little animal still further contracted, breathing deeply and hurriedly, like a little steam-engine.

Afterwards the boy made friends with this hedgehog. He was such a delicate, quiet little fellow, that even the different animals seemed to understand and soon became accustomed to him. Imagine his joy when the hedgehog tasted some milk which the owner of the flowerbed brought out in a saucer.

This spring the child could not go out to his favourite nook. His sister, as before, was sitting near him, no longer, however, at the window, but by his bed. She was reading a book, not for herself, but aloud to him, because it was difficult for him to raise his head from the white pillows, and difficult to hold even the smallest book in his little wasted hands. Besides which, his eyes quickly tired from reading. Most likely he would never again go to his favourite flowerbed.

“Masha!” he suddenly murmured to his sister.

“What, dearie?”

“Is it nice in my garden now? Are the roses out?”

His sister bent down, kissed his white cheek, and furtively brushed away a tear.

“Very nice, darling, very nice. And the roses are out. On Monday we will go out together there. The Doctor will let you go.”

The boy did not answer, and sighed heavily. His sister began to read aloud again to him.

“That is enough. I am tired. I would rather sleep.”

His sister arranged his pillows and the white counterpane, and he with difficulty turned over on to his side and kept silent. The sun shone through the window, which looked on to the flowerbed, and threw brilliant rays on to the bed and the little emaciated form lying on it, lighting up the pillows and coverlet, and gilding the closely-cropped hair and wasted neck of the child.

The rose knew nothing of this. It had grown and become even more beautiful. The following day it would be in full blossom, and the third day begin to fade and shed its petals. This was the whole life of the rose. But even in this short life it was destined to experience no little trepidation and sorrow.

The toad had noticed it.

When he for the first time saw the flower with his evil and hideous eyes, something strange stirred his toad’s heart. He could not tear himself away from the tender rose-petals, but all the time gazed and gazed at them. The rose attracted him immensely, and he felt a desire to be nearer such a fragrant and beautiful creation. But in order to express his tender feelings, he could think of nothing better to say than this:

“Wait a bit,” he croaked. “I will gobble you up.”

The rose shuddered. Why was she fastened to a stalk? Birds were free, twittering around her as they hopped and flew from branch to branch. Sometimes they went far away, where the rose did not know. The butterflies were also free! How she envied them! If only she were one! How she would take wing and fly from those wicked eyes, persecuting her with their fixed gaze. The rose did not know that toads sometimes waylay butterflies too.

“I will gobble you up!” he repeated, all the time looking at the blossom. And the poor creation with horror saw how the disgusting, sticky, clammy paws fastened round the branches of the bush on which she was growing. However, it was difficult for the toad to climb. His smooth body could only crawl and jump easily in smooth places. After each effort to reach the rose, he would look up to where the blossom swung, and the rose froze with fright.

“Oh, please,” she prayed, “if only I may die another death!”

But the toad still continued to clamber higher. However, when he reached where the older branches ended, and the young ones began, he had to suffer somewhat. The smooth dark green bark of the rose-tree was all covered with hard, sharp thorns. The toad kept pricking his paws and belly with them, and fell to the ground covered with blood. He looked at the flower with hatred.

“I have said I will gobble you up, and I will!” he repeated.

The evening came. It was necessary to think of supper, and the wounded toad, dragging himself along, seized incautious insects coming within his reach. Hatred did not prevent him from filling his inside as usual. Furthermore, his scratches were not very dangerous, and he decided, when he had had a rest, to try once again for the blossom which he hated but which so attracted him.

He rested for quite a long time. The morning came, midday passed, and the rose had almost forgotten about her enemy. She was now in full blossom, and was the most beautiful creation in the flowerbed. But there was no one to come to admire her. The little owner of the plot lay motionless in his bed. His sister never left him, and did not appear at the window. Only the birds and butterflies hovered round the rose, and the bees, buzzing, came and sometimes sat down inside the bloom, flying away quite covered with the yellow dust. A nightingale flew down, perched on the rosebush, and sang his song. How different from the wheezing of the toad! The rose heard this song and was happy. It seemed to her that the nightingale was singing to her, and perhaps she was right. She did not see how her enemy was clambering up the branches. This time the toad was not sparing either his paws or belly. He was covered with blood, but bravely clambered up higher; and in the middle of the resonant tender trills of the nightingale, the rose suddenly heard the familiar wheeze:

“I said I would gobble you up⁠—and I will gobble you up!”

His toad’s eyes gazed at the rose from a neighbouring branch. The evil-looking thing had only one more move to make to seize the blossom. The rose understood that the end was at hand.⁠ ⁠…

The little master had long lain motionless on his bed. His sister, sitting in the depths of an armchair, thought he was asleep. On her lap lay an open book, but she was not reading it. Gradually her tired head drooped; the poor girl had not slept for several nights, had not left her sick brother, and now she was lightly dozing.

“Masha!” he suddenly whispered.

Her sister gave a slight jump. She had been dreaming that she was sitting at the window, that her little brother was playing as last year in his flowerbed, and had called her. Opening her eyes, and seeing him in bed, wasted and weak, she gave a deep sigh.

“What, dearest?”

“Masha, you told me that the roses are out. Can you get me⁠ ⁠… just one?”

“Of course I can, darling.”

She went to the window, and looked at the rosebush. There was one blossom, and it was a magnificent rose.

“There is a rose which seems to have come out purposely for you, and what a beauty! Shall I get it, and put it here in a glass for you on the table? Yes?”

“Yes, on the table. I want it.”

The girl took a pair of scissors, and went out into the garden. She had not been out of the house for a long time. The sun blinded her, and she felt dizzy from the fresh air. She got to the bush at the very instant the toad had meant to seize the flower.

“Oh, how disgusting!” she cried, and seizing the branch shook it violently. The toad fell flat on its belly to the ground. In fury it sprang at the girl, but could not jump higher than the edge of her dress, and was immediately sent flying by the toe of her slipper. He did not dare to try a second time, only from afar saw how the girl carefully cut off the rose and took it into her brother’s room.

When the boy saw his sister with the rose in her hand, he smiled weakly for the first time for many a day, and with difficulty made a movement with his thin hand.

“Give it to me,” he whispered; “I want to smell it.”

His sister put the rose into his hand, and helped him to raise it to his face. He drew in the tender perfume, and, smiling happily, murmured:

“Ah, how good!”

Then his little face became serious and motionless, and he became silent forever.

The rose, although she had been cut before she had begun to shed her petals, felt that it had not been for nothing. They placed her in a separate glass on the little coffin, on which were heaped whole wreaths and other flowers, but to tell the truth no one paid any attention to them. But the young girl, when she placed the rose on the table, raised it to her lips and kissed it. A tear fell from her cheek on to the flower, and this was the best incident in the whole life of the rose. When it began to fade they put the flower into an old thick book, and pressed it, and many years after gave it to me. That is why I know the whole history of it.

Nadejda Nicolaievna

The Action at Aislar

The Frog Who Travelled

Once upon a time there lived in this world a frog. She used to sit in a swamp and catch mosquitoes and midges, and in the spring used to croak loudly in company with her friends. And but for an event which occurred she would have lived happily her whole life through⁠—provided, of course, a stork had not eaten her.

One day she was sitting on a crooked branch which stuck out of the water, and was revelling in a warm, slight drizzling rain.

“Ah me, what beautiful damp weather today!” she thought. “What a delight it is to live!”

The drizzle damped her striped polished back, and the raindrops trickled down under her belly behind her paws, which was extraordinarily pleasant⁠—so pleasant that she almost gave a croak. But luckily she remembered that it was already autumn, and that frogs don’t croak in the autumn⁠—the spring is the time for that⁠—and had she croaked she might have lost her “frogly” dignity. So she kept quiet and continued to take her ease.

Suddenly a thin, intermittent, whistling noise resounded in the air.

There is a species of duck which, when it flies, makes a singing, or rather a whistling, sound with its wings as they cleave the air. “Phew, phew, phew, phew!” sounds through the air when a covey of such ducks fly high above us, although the birds themselves are invisible, so high do they fly. On this occasion the ducks, having described an enormous semicircle, swooped down and settled in the very same swamp in which the frog lived.

“Quack, quack!” said one of them. “We have still a long way to fly; we must have something to eat.”

And the frog instantly hid herself, and, although she knew that the ducks would not eat her⁠—a big and fat frog⁠—she all the same dived under the log in case of accidents. However, having thought it over, she decided to stick her head with its protruding eyes out of the water. She was very curious to know to where the ducks were flying.

“Quack, quack!” said another duck. “It is already quite cold. Let us get away as quickly as possible to the South.”

And all the ducks began to quack loudly in token of their approval.

“Mesdames ducks,” said the frog, plucking up her courage, “what is the ‘South’ to which you are flying? Please excuse me for disturbing you.”

The ducks crowded round the frog. At first they evinced a decided inclination to eat her, but each on reflection came to the conclusion that she was too big to be swallowed. And then they all began to quack and flap their wings.

“It is very nice in the South! It is warm there now! And what lovely warm swamps there are there! What worms! It is nice in the South!”

They quacked to such a degree that they nearly deafened the frog. She could scarcely prevail on them to be quiet, and begged one of them, who seemed to her the fattest and most intelligent of them all, to explain to her what was the “South.” And when the duck told her all about the South, the frog went into ecstasies, but; nevertheless, at the end of the description, because she was a cautious frog, she asked him:

“And are there midges and mosquitoes there?”

“Oh, I should just say so⁠—clouds of them!” replied the duck.

“Croak!” said the frog, and immediately turned round to see if there was any friend near who could have heard her and scolded her for croaking in the autumn. She really could not restrain herself from giving at least one little croak. “Take me with you!”

“You astonish me!” exclaimed the duck. “How can we take you? You have no wings!”

“When do you fly?” asked the frog.

“Soon, soon!” cried out all the ducks. “Quack, quack, quack! Here it is cold! To the South! to the South!”

“Allow me to think only five minutes,” said the frog. “I will come back directly. I am sure to think of something good.”

And she flopped from the branch, on to which she had again clambered, into the water, dived into the mud, and absolutely buried herself in it, so that no extraneous matter should distract her thoughts. Five minutes passed, and the ducks had all collected to fly, when suddenly from out of the water near the branch on which the frog had sat her mouth appeared, and it wore an expression of delight such as only a frog’s mouth can assume.

“I have thought it out; I have found a way!” she said. “Let two of you, one at each end, take a twig in your beaks, and I will hang on to it in the middle. You will fly and I will travel. Only, whatever happens, you must not quack nor I croak⁠—and then all will be superb.”

Now, although, goodness knows, it is by no means a joke to carry a frog three thousand versts, keeping silent all the time, still the ingenuity of her plan sent the ducks into such a delirium of delight that they unanimously resolved to take the frog with them. They agreed to relieve each other every two hours, and as there were as many and many ducks as could be, and only one frog, no duck’s turn to carry the frog would come very often. They found a good strong twig, two ducks took it in their beaks, the frog caught hold in the middle with her mouth, and the whole covey rose into the air. The terrific height to which they flew up took the frog’s breath away. Besides which, the ducks did not fly evenly, and kept giving the twig jerks. The poor frog swung in the air like a paper “tumbling tommy,” and hung on by her jaw with all her might, so as not to be thrown off and flop to the ground. However, she soon became accustomed to her surroundings, and even began to look around her. Beneath her fields, meadows, rivers, and mountains passed by in rapid succession, but it was very difficult for her to take stock of them, because, hanging as she was from the twig, she could only see backwards and towards the sky; nevertheless, she managed to see something, and was very pleased and proud with herself.

“What a splendid idea it was of mine!” she thought to herself.

And as the rest of the ducks flew along behind the first pair which carried her they cried out to her and praised her.

“Our frog has an astonishingly clever head,” they said. “It would be difficult to find anything like it even amongst us ducks.”

The frog could scarcely restrain herself from thanking them, but, remembering that if she opened her mouth she would fall from a terrific height, she closed her jaw still tighter, and decided to resist the temptation. She swung in this manner for a whole day. The ducks who were carrying her relieved each other on the wing, cleverly catching hold of the twig. This was most terrifying. Several times the frog almost croaked from fright, but it was necessary to have plenty of presence of mind, which she possessed. In the evening the whole company halted in a swamp. At dawn the ducks with the frog continued their journey, but this time their passenger, in order to see the better what was happening, fastened on with her back and head to the front. The ducks flew over mown fields, woods turning yellow, and over villages full of corn-stacks. They could hear the people talking, and the noise of the machines with which they were threshing the rye. The villagers looked at the ducks, and, noticing something strange in their midst, pointed to it. And the frog longed to fly lower down, so as to show herself and to hear what they were saying about her. At the next halt she said:

“Is it possible for us to fiy not quite so high? It makes my head swim, and I am afraid of falling if I should suddenly feel bad.”

The kind ducks promised her to fly lower, and the following day they travelled so low that they could hear what was said.

“Look, look!” cried the children in one of the villages; “the ducks are carrying a frog!”

The frog heard this, and her heart jumped. “Look, look!” “grownups” cried in another village. “That’s an extraordinary thing!”

“Do they know that it was I who thought of this, and not the ducks?” the frog wondered to herself.

“Look, look!” they cried in a third village. “What a wonder! And who thought of such a clever dodge?” Thereupon the frog could stand it no longer, and, throwing caution to the winds, cried out at the top of her voice:

“It was I⁠—I!”

And with this cry she went tumbling over and over to the ground. The ducks quacked loudly, and one of them tried to catch hold of their unfortunate fellow-traveller as she was falling, but missed her. The frog, frantically waving all four paws, quickly fell to the ground, but as the ducks were flying very fast, she did not fall just at the spot above which she had cried out, and where there was a hard road, but much farther on, which was extremely lucky for her, because she flopped into a muddy pond on the edge of the village.

She quickly appeared from out of the water, and with all her might began to cry out:

“It was I⁠—it was I who thought of it!”

But there was no one near her. The local frogs, frightened by the unexpected splash, had all disappeared under water. When they began to reappear they gazed at the new arrival with astonishment.

And she related to them a wonderful story of how she had thought all her life about the matter, and had at last invented a new, unusual method of travelling by ducks. How she had her own special ducks which carried her where she wanted to go. How she had been in the beautiful South, where it was so nice, where there are such lovely warm swamps, and such quantities of midges, and every other kind of edible insects.

“I have come here to see how you live,” she said. “I shall stay with you until the spring, until my ducks, which I have let go, return.”

But the ducks never returned. They thought that the frog had been smashed to pieces by her fall, and were very sorry for her.

The Signal

Simon Ivanoff was a linesman on the railway. From his hut it was twenty versts to the nearest station on one side, and ten versts on the other. Last year, about four versts away, a spinning-mill had opened, and its tall chimney stood out darkly against the forest, but except for the huts of other linesmen there was no living soul nearer him.

Simon Ivanoff’s health had broken down generally. Nine years ago he had been at the war and had acted as servant to an officer, with whom he served right through the campaign. He had starved, been roasted by the sun, had frozen, and had made marches of forty and fifty versts in the heat and frost. He had been under fire, but, thank God! no bullet had touched him. Once his regiment had been in the first line. For a whole week there had been skirmishes with the Turks; the Russian and Turkish firing-lines had been separated only by a deep strath, and from morn till eve they kept up a continuous crossfire. Simon’s officer had also been in the firing-line, and three times a day Simon took him a steaming samovar and his dinner from the regimental kitchen in the ravine. As he went with the samovar along the open, bullets hummed about him, and snapped viciously against the stones in a manner terrifying to Simon, who used to cry, but still kept on. The officers were very pleased with him, because there was always hot tea for them. He returned from the campaign whole, but with rheumatism in his hands and feet. He had experienced no little sorrow since then. He arrived home to find his father, an old man, had died; his little four-year-old son also dead (his throat), so there only remained Simon and his wife. They could not do much. It was difficult to plough with swollen hands and feet. They could no longer stay in their own village, and they started off to seek fortune in new places. Simon and his wife stayed for a short time on the line, in Cherson and in Donschina, but nowhere found luck. Then the wife went out to service, and Simon, as formerly, travelled about. Once he happened to travel on an engine, and at one of the stations he saw the stationmaster, whose face seemed familiar to him. Simon looked at the stationmaster and the stationmaster at Simon, and they recognized each other. He had been an officer of Simon’s regiment.

“You are Ivanoff?” he said.

“Exactly, Your Excellency; that’s me.”

“How have you got here?”

Simon told him all.

“Where are you off to?”

“I cannot tell you, sir.”

“You idiot! How ‘can’t’ you tell me?”

“Quite true, Your Excellency, because there is nowhere to go. I must look for work, sir.”

The stationmaster looked at him, thought a bit, and said: “Look here, friend, stay here a bit at the station. You are married, I think. Where is your wife?”

“Yes, Your Excellency, I am married. My wife is at Kursk, in service with a merchant.”

“Well, write to your wife to come here. I will give you a free pass for her. We have a linesman’s hut empty. I will speak to the District Chief on your behalf.”

“I shall be very grateful, Your Excellency,” replied Simon.

He stayed at the station, helped in the kitchen of the stationmaster, cut firewood, kept the yard clean, and swept the platform. In a fortnight’s time his wife arrived, and Simon went on a hand-trolley to his hut. The hut was a new one and warm, with as much wood as he wanted. There was a little vegetable garden, the legacy of former linesmen, and there was about half a dessiatine15 of ploughed land on either side of the railway embankment. Simon was rejoiced. He began to think of doing some farming, of purchasing a cow and horse.

He was given all necessary stores⁠—a green flag, a red flag, lanterns, a horn, hammer, screw-wrench for the nuts, a crowbar, spade, broom, bolts, and nails; they gave him two books of regulations, and a timetable of the trains. At first Simon could not sleep at night, and learnt the whole timetable by heart. Two hours before a train was due he would go round his section, sit on the bench at his hut, and look and listen whether the rails were trembling or the rumble of the train could be heard. He even learned the regulations by heart, although he could only read by spelling out each word.

It was summer; the work was not heavy; there was no snow to clear away, and the trains on that line are infrequent. Simon used to go over his verst twice a day, examine and screw up nuts here and there, keep the bed level, look at the water-pipes, and then go home to his own affairs. There was only one drawback⁠—i.e., whatever he wished to do he had first to obtain permission of the Traffic Inspector. Simon and his wife even began to get bored.

Two months passed, and Simon began to make the acquaintance of his neighbours, the other linesmen on either side of him. One was a very old man, whom the authorities were always meaning to relieve. He scarcely moved out of his hut. His wife used to do all his work. The other linesman nearer the station was a young man, thin, but muscular. He and Simon met for the first time on the line midway between the huts. Simon took off his hat and bowed. “Good health to you, neighbour,” he said.

The neighbour glanced askance at him. “How do you do?” he replied; then turned around and made off.

Later the wives met. Simon’s wife passed the time of day with her neighbour, but she also did not say much and went off.

On one occasion Simon said to her: “Young woman, your husband is not very talkative.”

The woman said nothing at first, then replied: “But what is there for him to talk with you about? Everyone has his own business. Go your way, and God be with you.”

However, after another month or so they became acquainted. Simon would go with Vassili along the line, sit on the edge of a pipe, smoke, and talk of life. Vassili, for the most part, kept silent, but Simon talked of his village, and of the campaign through which he had passed.

“I have had no little sorrow in my day,” he would say; “and goodness knows I have not lived long. God has not given me happiness, but what He may give, so will it be. That’s so, friend Vassili Stepanich.”

Vassili Stepanich knocked out the ashes of his pipe against a rail, stood up, and said: “It is not luck which follows us in life, but human beings. There is no wild beast on this earth more ferocious, cruel, and evil than man. Wolf does not eat wolf, but a man will readily devour man.”

“Come, friend, don’t say that; a wolf eats wolf.”

“The words came into my mind and I said it. All the same, there is nothing more cruel than man. If it were not for his wickedness and greed it would be possible to live. Everybody tries to sting you to the quick, to bite and devour you.”

Simon pondered a bit. “I don’t know, brother,” he said; “perhaps it is as you say, and perhaps it is God’s will.”

“And perhaps, then,” said Vassili, “it is waste of time for me to talk with you. To put everything unpleasant on God, and sit and suffer, means, brother, being not a man but an animal. That’s what I have to say.” And he turned and went off without saying goodbye.

Simon also got up. “Neighbour,” he called, “why do you lose your temper?” But his neighbour did not look round, and went on.

Simon gazed after him until Vassili was lost to sight in the cutting at the turn. He went home and said to his wife: “Well, Arina, our neighbour is a wicked person, not a man.”

However, they did not quarrel. They met again, and, as formerly, discussed the same old topics.

“Ah, friend, if it were not for men we should not be sitting, you and I, in these huts,” said Vassili, on one occasion.

“And what about the huts?⁠ ⁠… not so bad; it is possible to live in them.”

“Possible to live in them, indeed!⁠ ⁠… Eh! You!⁠ ⁠… You have lived long and learned little, looked at much and seen little. What sort of life is there for a poor man in a hut here or there. These cannibals are devouring you. They are extracting all your lifeblood, and when you become old, they will throw you out just as they do with husks they feed pigs on. What pay do you get?”

“Not much, Vassili Stepanich⁠—twelve roubles.”

“And I, thirteen and a half roubles. Allow me to ask you why? By the regulations the Company should give us fifteen roubles a month with firing and lighting. Who decides that you should have twelve roubles, or I thirteen and a half? Ask yourself!⁠ ⁠… And you say it is possible to live! You understand it is not a question of one and a half roubles or three roubles⁠—even if they paid us each the whole fifteen roubles. I was at the station last month. The Director passed through, so I saw him⁠ ⁠… I had that honour.⁠ ⁠… He had a separate carriage, came out and stood on the platform, stood.⁠ ⁠… Yes, I shall not stay here long; I shall go, anywhere, follow my nose.”

“But where will you go, Stepanich? One does not seek good from good. Here you have a house, warmth, a little piece of land. Your wife is a worker⁠ ⁠…”

“Land! You should look at my piece of land. Not a twig on it⁠—nothing. I had planted some cabbages in the spring, just when the Traffic Inspector came along. He said: ‘What is this? Why have you not reported this? Why have you done this without permission? Dig them up, roots and all.’ He was drunk. Another time he would not have said a word, but this time it got into his head⁠ ⁠… three roubles fine!⁠ ⁠…”

Vassili kept silent for a while, pulling at his pipe, then added quietly: “A little more and I should have done for him.”

“But, neighbour, you are hot-tempered.”

“No, I am not hot-tempered, but I tell the truth and think. Yes, he will still get a bloody nose from me. I will complain to the District Chief. We will see then!” And he did complain.

Once the District Chief came along to inspect the line. Three days later important personages were coming from St. Petersburg, were to pass over the line. They were conducting an inquiry, so that previous to their journey it was necessary to put everything in order. Ballast was laid down, the bed was levelled, the sleepers carefully examined, spikes driven in a bit, nuts screwed up, posts painted, and orders were given for yellow sand to be sprinkled at the level crossings. The woman at the neighbouring hut turned her old man out to weed. Simon worked for a whole week. He put everything in order, mended his kaftan, cleaned and polished his brass plate with a piece of brick until it fairly shone. Vassili also worked hard. The District Chief arrived on a trolley, four men worked the handles, the levers making the six wheels hum. The trolley travelled at twenty versts an hour, but the wheels squeaked. It reached Simon’s hut, and he ran out and reported in soldierly fashion. All appeared to be in repair.

“Have you been long here?” inquired the Chief.

“Since the second of May, Your Excellency.”

“All right. Thank you. And who is at hut No. 164?”

The Traffic Inspector (he was travelling with the Chief on the trolley) replied: “Vassili Spiridoff.”

“Spiridoff. Spiridoff.⁠ ⁠… Ah! is he the man against whom you made a note last year?”

“The same.”

“Well, we will see Vassili Spiridoff. Go on!” The workmen laid to the handles, and the trolley got under way. Simon watched it, and thought, “Well, there will be trouble between them and my neighbour.”

About two hours later he started on his round. He saw someone coming along the line from the cutting. Something white showed on his head. Simon began to look more attentively. It was Vassili; he had a stick in his hand, a small bundle on his shoulder, and his cheek was bound up in a handkerchief.

“Where are you off to, neighbour?” cried Simon.

Vassili came quite close. He was very pale, white as chalk, and his eyes had a wild look. Almost choking, he muttered: “To the town⁠—to Moscow⁠—to the Head Office.”

“Head Office? Ah, you are going, I suppose, to complain. Give it up! Vassili Stepanich, forget it.⁠ ⁠…”

“No, mate, I will not forget. It is too late. See! He struck me in the face, drew blood. So long as I live I will not forget.⁠ ⁠… I will not leave it like this!⁠ ⁠…”

Simon took him by the hand. “Give it up, Stepanich. I am advising you truly. You will not better things.⁠ ⁠…”

“Better things! I know myself that I shall not do better. You spoke truly about Fate. Better for myself not to do it, but one must stand up for the right, mate.”

“But tell me, how did it all happen?”

“How?⁠ ⁠… He examined everything, got down from the trolley, looked into the hut. I knew beforehand that he would be strict, and so put everything into proper order as it should be. He was just going when I made my complaint. He immediately cried out: ‘Here,’ he said, ‘is a Government inquiry coming, and you make a complaint about a vegetable garden. Here,’ he said, ‘are Privy Councillors coming, and you come worrying about cabbages!⁠ ⁠…’ I lost patience and said something⁠—not very much, but it offended him, and he struck me in the face⁠ ⁠… and I stood still; I did nothing, just as if it was in the proper order of things. They went off; I came to myself, washed my face, and left.”

“And what about the hut?”

“The wife has stayed. She will look after things all right. Never mind about their roads.”

Vassili got up and collected himself. “Goodbye, Ivanoff.⁠ ⁠… I do not know whether I shall get anyone at the Office to hear me.”

“Surely you are not going to walk?”

“At the station I will try to get on a goods-train, and tomorrow I shall be in Moscow.”

The neighbours bade each other farewell. Vassili was absent for some time. His wife worked for him night and day. She never slept, and wore herself out waiting for her husband. On the third day the commission arrived. An engine, luggage-van, and two first-class saloons; but Vassili was still away. Simon saw the wife on the fourth day. Her face was swollen from crying and her eyes were red.

“Has your husband returned?” he asked. But the woman only made a gesture with her hands, and without saying a word went her way.

Simon had learnt when still a lad to make flutes out of a kind of reed. He used to burn out the heart of the stalk, make holes where necessary, drill them, make a mouthpiece at one end, and tune them so well that it was possible to play almost anything you wanted on them. He made a number of them in his spare time, and sent them by his friends amongst the guards on the goods-trains to the bazaar in the town. He got two kopecks apiece for them. On the day following the visit of the commission he left his wife at home to meet the six o’clock train, and, taking a knife, started off to the forest to cut some sticks. He went to the end of his section⁠—at this point the line makes a sharp turn⁠—went down the embankment, and went into the wood under the mountain. About half a verst away there was a big marsh, around which there grew splendid bushes out of which to make his flutes. He cut a whole bundle of sticks and started back home. As he went through the wood the sun was already getting low, and in the dead stillness only the twittering of the birds was audible, and the crackle of the dead wood under his feet. As Simon walked along rapidly and easily he fancied he heard the clang of iron striking iron, and he redoubled his pace. There was no repair going on in his section at this time. What did it mean? he wondered. Coming out on to the fringe of the wood, the railway embankment stood high before him; on the top of it a man was squatting on the bed of the line busily engaged in something. Simon commenced to crawl up quietly towards him. He thought that it was someone after the nuts which secure the rails. He watched, and a man got up, holding a crowbar in his hand. He had loosened a rail with it, so that it would move to one side. A mist came before Simon’s eyes; he wanted to cry out, but could not. It was Vassili!⁠ ⁠… Simon scrambled up the bank as Vassili with crowbar and wrench slid headlong down the other side.

“Vassili Stepanich! For the love.⁠ ⁠… Old friend! Come back! Give me the crowbar. We will put the rail back; no one will know. Come back! Save your soul from this sin!”

Vassili did not look back, but disappeared into the wood.

Simon stood before the rail which had been torn up. He threw down his bundle of sticks. A train was due; not a goods-train, but a passenger-train. And he had nothing with which to stop it, no flag. He could not replace the rail and could not drive in the spikes with his bare hands. It was necessary to run, absolutely necessary to run to the hut for some tools. “God help me!” he murmured.

Simon started running towards his hut. He was out of breath, but still ran, falling every now and then. He had cleared the forest; there only remained another hundred sajenes to the hut, not more, when he heard the distant hooter of the factory sound⁠—six o’clock! In two minutes’ time No. 7 train was due. “Oh, Lord! Have pity on innocent souls!” In his mind Simon saw the engine strike against the loosened rail with its left wheel, shiver, careen, tear up and splinter the sleepers⁠—and just there, there was a curve and the embankment eleven sajenes high, down which the engine would topple⁠—and the third-class carriages would be packed⁠ ⁠… little children.⁠ ⁠… They are all sitting in the train now not dreaming of any danger. “Oh, Lord! Tell me what to do!⁠ ⁠… No, it is not possible to run to the hut and get back in time.”

Simon did not run on to the hut, but turned back and ran faster than before. He was running almost mechanically, blindly; he did not know himself what was to happen. He ran as far as the rail which had been pulled up; his sticks were lying in a heap. He bent down, seized one without knowing why, and ran on farther. It seemed to him that the train was already coming. He heard the distant whistle; he heard the quiet, even tremor of the rails; but his strength was exhausted, he could run no farther, and came to a halt about one hundred sajenes from the awful spot. Then an idea came into his head, literally like a ray of light. Pulling off his cap, he took out of it a cotton scarf, drew his knife out of the upper part of his boot, and crossed himself, muttering, “God bless me!”

He buried the knife into his left arm above the elbow; the blood spurted out, flowing in a hot stream. In this he soaked his scarf, smoothed it out, tied it to the stick and hung out his red flag.

He stood waving his flag. The train was already in sight. The driver will not see him⁠—will come close up, and a heavy train cannot be pulled up in a hundred sajenes.

And the blood kept on flowing. Simon kept pressing the sides of the wound together wanting to close it, but the blood did not diminish. Evidently he had cut his arm very deeply. His head commenced to swim, black spots began to dance before his eyes, and then it became dark. There was a ringing in his ears. He could not see the train or hear the noise. Only one thought possessed him. “I shall not be able to keep standing up. I shall fall and drop the flag; the train will pass over me.⁠ ⁠… Help me, oh Lord!⁠ ⁠…”

All became quite black before him, his mind became a blank, and he dropped the flag; but the bloodstained banner did not fall to the ground. A hand seized it and held it high to meet the approaching train. The engine-driver saw it, shut the regulator, and reversed steam. The train came to a standstill.

People jumped out of the carriages and collected in a crowd. Looking, they saw a man lying senseless on the footway, drenched in blood, and another man standing beside him with a bloodstained rag on a stick.

Vassili looked around at all; then, lowering his head, said: “Bind me; I have pulled up a rail!”