IX
KUZMA spent the evening and the night in the garden, in the old bath-house. The superintendent, on arriving from the fields on horseback, had remarked angrily that the garden had been “leased long ago,” and in reply to a request for lodging over-night had expressed insolent amazement. “Well, but you are a sensible fellow!” he had shouted, without either rhyme or reason. “A nice posting-station you’ve picked out! Are there many of your stamp roving about at present?” But he took pity on Kuzma in the end, and gave him permission to go into the bath-house. Kuzma paid off Menshoff and walked past the manor-house to the gate into the linden avenue. Through the unlighted open windows, from beyond the wire fly-screens, thundered a grand piano, drowned by a magnificent baritone-tenor voice, lifted in intricate vocalizations which were completely out of harmony with both the evening and the manor. Along the muddy sand of the sloping avenue, at the end of which, as if at the end of the world, the cloud-flecked sky gleamed dully white, there advanced toward Kuzma a poor-looking peasant, short of stature, with dark reddish hair, his shirt minus a belt; he was capless, wore heavy boots, and was carrying a bucket in his hand.
“Oho, ho!” he said, jeeringly, as he listened to the singing while he walked on. “Oho, he’s going it strong, may his belly burst!”
“Who is going it strong?” inquired Kuzma.
The peasant raised his head and halted. “Why, that young gentleman of ours,” he said, merrily, making havoc with his consonants. “They say he has been doing that these seven years.”
“Which one—the one who was chasing the dogs?”
“N-no, another one. But that’s not all! Sometimes he takes to screeching, ‘To-day ’tis your turn, to-morrow ’twill be mine’—regular calamity!”
“He’s taking lessons, of course?”
“Nice lessons they must be!”
“And that other one—what does he do?”
“That fellow?” The peasant drew a long breath, smiling in a discreetly jeering manner the while. “Why, nothing. Why should he? he has good victuals and amusement: Fedka tosses bottles, and he shoots at them; sometimes he buys a peasant’s beard, cuts it off, and stuffs it into his gun, for fun. Then again, there are the dogs: we have an immense number of them. On Sundays, when the church bells begin to peal, the whole pack of them sets to howling; ’tis an awful row they make! Day before yesterday they chewed up a peasant’s dog, and the peasants went to the courtyard of the manor. ‘Give us enough to buy a vedro[30] of liquor, and we’ll call it quits. Otherwise, we’ll go on strike at once.’”
“Well, did he give the money?”
“Of course he didn’t! Gi-ive, indeed, brother!—There is a miller here. He came straight out on the porch and said: ‘The wind is blowing from the fields, gentlemen-nobles!’ Catch him napping, forsooth! The young gentleman started to bully them: ‘What sort of a wind is that you’re talking about?’ ‘Just a certain sort,’ says he. ‘I’ve propounded a riddle to you; now you just think it over!’ That brought him to a dead standstill, brother!”
All this was uttered in a careless sort of way, passed over lightly, with intervening pauses, but accompanied by such a malignant smile and such torturing of his consonants that Kuzma began to look more attentively at the man whom he had thus casually encountered. In appearance he resembled a fool. His hair was straight, cut in a round crop, and long. His face was small, insignificant, of ancient Russian type, like the holy pictures of the Suzdal school. His boots were huge, his body lean and somehow wooden. His eyes, beneath large, sleepy lids, were like those of a hawk, with a golden ring around the iris. When he lowered his lids he was a lisping idiot; when he raised them one felt a certain fear of him.
“Do you live in the garden?” asked Kuzma.
“Yes. Where else should I live?”
“And what’s your name?”
“My name? Akim. And who are you?”
“I wanted to lease the garden.”
“There, now—that is an idea!” And Akim, wagging his head scoffingly, went on his way.
The wind blew with ever increasing vehemence, scattering showers of rain from the brilliantly green trees; beyond the park, in some low-lying region, the thunder rumbled dully, pale blue flashes of aurora borealis lighted up the avenue, and nightingales were singing everywhere about. It was utterly incomprehensible how they were able so sedulously, in such complete disregard of surrounding conditions, to warble, trill, and scatter their notes broadcast so sweetly and vigorously beneath that heavy sky, veiled in leaden clouds, amid the trees bending in the wind, as they perched in the dense, wet bushes. But still more incomprehensible was it how the watchmen managed to pass the night in such a gale, how they could sleep on damp straw beneath the sloping roof of the rotten hut.
There were three watchmen. And all of them were sick men. One, young, emaciated, sympathetic, formerly a baker by trade, but dismissed the preceding autumn for taking part in a strike, was now a beggar. He had not as yet lost the peasant look, and he complained of fever. The second, also a beggar, but already middle-aged, had tuberculosis, although he declared that there was nothing the matter with him except that he felt “cold between his shoulders.” Akim was afflicted with night-blindness—he could not see well in the half-light of twilight. When Kuzma approached, the baker, pale and amiable of manner, was squatting on his heels near the hut. With the sleeves of a woman’s wadded dressing gown tucked up on his thin, weak arms, he was engaged in washing millet in a wooden bowl. Consumptive Mitrofan, a man of medium size, broad and dark complexioned, who resembled a native of Dahomey, garbed entirely in wet rags and leg-wrappers which were worn out and stiff as an old horse’s hoof, was standing beside the baker and, with hunched-up shoulders, staring at the latter’s work with brilliant brown eyes, strained wide open but devoid of all expression. Akim had brought a bucket of water and was making a fire in a little clay oven-niche opposite the hut; he was blowing the fire into life. He entered the hut, selected the driest tufts of straw he could find, and again approached the fire, which was now fragrantly smoking beneath the iron kettle, muttering to himself the while, breathing with a whistling sound, smiling in a mockingly mysterious way at the bantering of his comrades, and occasionally bringing them up short with a venomous and clever remark. Kuzma shut his eyes and listened now to the conversation, now to the nightingales, as he sat on a wet bench beside the hut, besprinkled with icy spatterings of rain whenever the damp wind rushed through the avenue beneath the gloomy sky, which quivered with pale flashes of lightning, while the thunder rumbled. He felt a pain in his stomach, from hunger and tobacco. It seemed as if the porridge would never be cooked, and he could not banish from his mind the thought that perhaps he himself would be obliged to live just such a wild beast’s life as that of these watchmen, and that ahead of him lay nothing but old age, sickness, loneliness, and poverty. His body ached, and the gusts of wind, the far-away monotonous grumbling of the thunder, the nightingales, and the leisurely, carelessly malicious lisping of Akim and his squeaking voice, all irritated him.
“You ought to buy yourself at least a belt, Akimushka,” said the baker with affected simplicity, as he lighted a cigarette. He kept casting glances at Kuzma, by way of inviting him to listen to Akim.
“Just you wait,” replied Akim in an absent-minded, scoffing tone, as he poured the fluid porridge from the boiling kettle into a cup. “When we’ve lived here with the proprietor through the summer, I’ll buy you boots with a squeak in them.”
“‘With a skvvvveak’! Well, I’m not asking you to do anything of the sort.”
“You’re wearing leg-wrappers now.” And Akim began anxiously to take a test sip of the porridge from the spoon.
The baker was disconcerted, and heaved a sigh: “Why should the likes of us wear boots?”
“Oh, stop that,” said Kuzma. “You had better tell me whether you have this porridge day in and day out, for ever and ever, as I think you do.”
“Well, and what would you like—fish, and ham?” inquired Akim, without turning round, as he licked the spoon. “That really wouldn’t be so bad: a dram of vodka, about three pounds of sturgeon, a knuckle of ham, a little glass of fruit cordial. But this isn’t porridge: it’s called thin gruel. The porridge is for the appetizer snack.”
“But do you make cabbage soup, or any other sort of soup?”
“We have had that, brother—cabbage soup; and what soup it was! If you were to spill it on the dog his hair would peel off!”
“Well, you might make a little soup.”
“But where would we get the potatoes? You can’t buy any from a peasant, any more than from the devil, brother! You couldn’t wheedle even snow out of a peasant in the middle of winter.”
Kuzma shook his head.
“Probably ’tis your illness that makes you so bitter! You ought to get a little treatment—”
Akim, without replying, squatted down on his heels in front of the fire. The fire had already died down; only a little heap of thin coals glowed red under the kettle; the garden grew darker and darker, and the blue aurora had already begun faintly to illuminate their faces, as the gusts of wind inflated Akim’s shirt. Mitrofan was sitting beside Kuzma, leaning on his stick; the baker sat on a stump under a linden tree. On hearing Kuzma’s last words, he grew serious.
“This is the way I look at it,” he said submissively and sadly: “that nothing can be otherwise than as the Lord decrees. If the Lord does not grant health, then all the doctors cannot help. Akim, yonder, speaks the truth: no one can die before his death-hour comes.”
“Doctors!” interposed Akim, staring at the coals and pronouncing the word in a specially vicious way—“doktogga!” “Doctors, brother, have an eye on their pockets. I’d let out his guts for him, for such a doctor, so I would!”
“Not all of them are thinking of their pockets,” said Kuzma.
“I haven’t seen all of them.”
“Well, then, don’t chatter nonsense about what you haven’t seen,” said Mitrofan severely, and turned to the baker: “Yes, and you’re a nice one, too: making yourself out a hopeless beggar! Perchance, if you didn’t wallow round on the ground, dog-fashion, you wouldn’t have that acute pain.”
“Why, you see, I—” the baker began.
But at this point Akim’s scoffing composure deserted him of a sudden. And, rolling his stupid hawk-like eyes, he abruptly leaped to his feet and began to yell, with the irascibility of an idiot: “What? So I’m chattering nonsense, am I? Have you been in the hospital? Have you? And I have been there! I spent seven days there—and did he give me any white-bread rolls, that doctor of yours? Did he?”
“Yes, you’re a fool,” interposed Mitrofan: “white rolls are not given to every sick person: it depends on their disease.”
“Ah! It depends on their disease! Well, let him go burst with his disease, devil take him!” shouted Akim.
And, casting furious glances about him, he flung his spoon into the “thin gruel” and strode off into the hut.