XVI
IN the tiny ante-room he pushed aside with his foot a heavy, dirty horsecloth which lay across the threshold and went to one corner, where, over a stool surmounted by a pewter basin, a brass washstand was fastened, while on a small shelf lay a small, clammy piece of cocoanut-oil soap. As he rattled the water-tank, squinted, frowned, and puffed out his nostrils, he was not able to refrain from a malicious fugitive glance, and he remarked with peculiar distinctness: “H’m! No, who ever saw the like of the labourers? There’s no getting on with them at all nowadays! Say one word to such a fellow, and he’ll come back at you with ten words! Say a dozen to him, and he’ll fling you back a hundred! They’re gone dead crazy! Though it isn’t summer time, there’s plenty of you to be had, you devils! You’ll want something to eat for the winter, brother—you’ll come, you son of a dog, you’ll co-ome, and bow lo-o-ow in entreaty!”
The towel, which served for the master as well as for the lodger-travellers, had been hanging beside the water-tank since St. Michael’s Day. It was so filthy that Tikhon Ilitch gritted his teeth when he looked at it. “Okh!” he ejaculated, closing his eyes and shaking his head. “Ugh! Holy Mother, Queen of Heaven!” And hurling the towel on the floor, he wiped himself on the embroidered skirt of his shirt, which flapped outside his waistcoat.
Two doors opened from the ante-room. One, on the left, led to the room assigned to travellers, which was long, half-dark, and with tiny windows that looked out on the barn; in it stood two large divans, hard as stone, covered with black oilcloth, filled more than full with living and with crushed and dried bugs, while on the partition-wall hung the portrait of some general with fierce beaver-like side whiskers. This portrait was bordered with small portraits of heroes of the Russo-Turkish war, and underneath was an inscription: “Long will our children and our dear Slavic brethren remember the glorious deeds; how our father, the courageous Suleiman Pasha, crushed and conquered the treacherous foemen and marched with his lads along such crags as only clouds and the feathered Kings of the air were wont to scale.” The second door led into the master’s room. There, on the right alongside the door, glittered the glass of a cupboard, on the left a stove-bench gleamed white; the stove had cracked at some past day, and over the white it had been smeared with clay, which had imparted to it the outline of something resembling a thin, dislocated man, which seriously displeased Tikhon Ilitch. Beyond the stove rose aloft a double bed: above the bed was nailed up a rug of dull-green and brick-coloured wool, bearing the image of a tiger with whiskers and ears which stood erect like those of a cat. Opposite the door, against the wall, stood a chest of drawers covered with a knitted tablecloth, and on the tablecloth Nastasya Petrovna’s wedding-casket. In the casket lay contracts with the labourers, phials containing medicines long since spoiled with age, matches.
“Wanted in the shop!” screamed the cook, opening the door a crack.
“There’s no hurry—the goats in the bazaar can wait!” replied Tikhon Ilitch wrathfully—but he hurried out.
The distance was veiled by a watery mist; the effect resembled that of twilight. The rain still drizzled on, but the wind had veered round; it was now blowing from the North, and the air had grown colder. The freight train, which was just pulling out of the station, rattled more cheerfully and resoundingly than it had for many days past.
“’Morning, Ilitch,” said the hare-lipped peasant, who was holding a wet piebald horse at the porch, as he nodded his soaking fur cap, which was of the tall Mandzhurian shape.
“’Morning,” nodded Tikhon Ilitch, casting a sidelong glance at the strong white tooth which gleamed through the peasant’s cleft lip. “What do you need?” And, hastily providing the salt and kerosene required, he hurried back to his chamber. “The dogs, they don’t give a man time to make the sign of the cross on his brow!” he grumbled as he went.
The samovar, which stood on a table against the partition-wall, was bubbling and boiling hard; the small mirror which hung above the table was enveloped in a thin layer of white steam. The windows and the chromo-lithograph which was nailed to the wall under the mirror—it depicted a giant in a yellow kaftan and red morocco boots, with a Russian banner in his hand, from beneath which peeped the towers and domes of the Moscow Kremlin—were also veiled in steam. Photographic portraits framed in shell-work surrounded this picture. In the place of honour hung the portrait of a priest in a moiré cassock, with a small, sparse beard, plump cheeks, and extremely small penetrating eyes. And, with a glance at him, Tikhon Ilitch crossed himself violently towards the holy pictures in the corner. Then he removed from the samovar a smoke-begrimed teapot and poured out a cup of tea, which smelled very much like a steamed bathroom.
“They don’t give a man a chance to cross himself,” he said, wrinkling his face with the expression of a person suffering martyrdom. “They fairly cut my throat, curse them!”
It seemed as if there were something which he ought to call to mind, to take under consideration, or as if he ought simply to go to bed and get a good sleep. He longed for warmth, repose, clearness, firmness of thought. He rose, went to the glass cupboard with its rattling panes and cups and saucers, and took from one of the shelves a bottle of liqueur flavoured with mountain-ash berries and a cask-shaped glass on which was inscribed: “Even monks take this.” “But perhaps I oughtn’t,” he said aloud. However, he lacked firmness. Through his mind, against his will, flashed the old saw: “Drink and you’ll die, and don’t drink and you’ll die just the same.” So he poured out a glassful and tossed it off, poured out another and gulped that down, also. And, munching at a thick cracknel, he sat down at the table.
He became conscious of an agreeable burning sensation inside, and eagerly sipped the boiling tea from his saucer, sucking at a lump of sugar which he held in his teeth. He felt better, so far as his body was concerned. But his soul went on living its own life, which was both gloomy and melancholy. Thoughts followed thoughts, but there was no sense in them. As he sipped his tea, he cast an abstracted and suspicious glance sidelong at the partition-wall, at the man in the yellow kaftan, at the photographs in the shell-work frames, and even at the priest in his watered-silk cassock. “Lerigion means nothing to us pigs!” he said to himself; and, as though by way of justifying himself to some one, he added roughly: “Just you try living in the village, and drinking sparkling kvas, like us!”
As he gazed askance at the priest he felt that everything was dubious; even his habitual reverence for that priest seemed doubtful, not founded on reason. When one really came to think about it....
But at this point he made haste to transfer his glance to the Moscow Kremlin. “Shame on me!” he muttered. “I’ve never been in Moscow since I was born!” No, he had not. And why? His pigs wouldn’t let him! Now it was his petty trading which hindered, now the posting-station, then the pot-house, then Durnovka. And now he could not get away because of the stallion and the boar-pigs. But why speak of Moscow? For the last ten years he had been intending, without success, to get as far as the little birch grove that lay the other side of the highway. He had kept on hoping that somehow or other he would manage to tear himself free for an evening, carry a rug and samovar with him, sit on the grass in the cool air, in the greenery—and he simply had not been able to get away. The days flowed past like water between the fingers, and before one had time to gather one’s wits together, one’s fiftieth year had knocked at the door, and that meant the end of everything, and it didn’t seem so very long ago that one was running about without any breeches, did it? Just as if it had been yesterday!