A family of noblemen

by Mikhail Evgrafovich Saltykov

Had Arina Petrovna heard this harangue, it would have made her impatient, and she would have let the orator know that it did. But Simple Simon was fortunate that his mind could not, as it were, retain other people's words, and not a syllable of Yudushka's speech reached its destination.

So Stepan Vladimirych parted with his brothers amicably. And there was some vanity in his showing Yakov, the village clerk, two twenty-five ruble notes that had been left in his hands after the brothers had departed.

"This will last me a long time," he said. "We've got tobacco. We're well provided with tea and sugar. Nothing is missing but vodka. However, should we want vodka, we'll get vodka, too. Nevertheless, I will restrain myself for a little while yet. I am too busy now, I have to keep an eye on the cellars. Weaken your watch for a single instant, and everything will be pillaged. She saw me, brother, she saw me, the hag, once, when I was gliding by along the kitchen wall. She stood at the window looking at me and I bet she thought: 'Well, well, so that's why I miss so many cucumbers.'"

Then came October. It began to rain, the road turned black, into an impassable stream of mud. Stepan Vladimirych could not go out because his only garments were his father's old dressing-gown and worn slippers. He sat at his window watching the tiny, humble village drowned in mud. There, in the gray autumn mist, men were moving about briskly, looking like black dots.

The heavy summer work was still in full swing, but now its setting was no longer the jubilant, sun-flooded hues of summer, but the endless autumn twilight. The corn kilns emitted clouds of smoke far into the night. The melancholy clatter of the flails resounded in the air. Thrashing was also going on in the manorial barns, and in the office they said it would hardly be possible to get through with the whole mass of grain before Shrovetide. Everything looked gloomy and drowsy, everything spoke of oppressiveness. The doors of the counting-house were no longer ajar, and inside the air was filled with a bluish fog rising from the wet fur cloaks.

It is difficult to say what impression this spectacle of a toilsome, rural autumn made on Stepan's mind, and whether he was at all aware of the labors going on in the incessant rain out in the boggy fields. One thing is certain, that the drab, tearful autumn sky oppressed him. It seemed to hang close down over his head and threaten to drown him in a deluge of mud. All he had to do was to look out through the window and watch the heavy masses of clouds. From the dawn on they covered the heavens, hanging motionless as if spellbound. Even after several hours they were still in the same place, without the slightest apparent change in hue or outline. In the morning, one cloud, heavy and black, had a ragged shape resembling a priest in a cassock with outstretched arms. It was clearly outlined on the pallid background of the upper clouds, and at noon it still had the identically same form. The right hand, it is true, had become shorter, and the left was stretched out in an ugly fashion and was sending down such a flood of rain that against the dark background of the sky there formed a streak still darker, almost black. Another huge shaggy lump of a cloud a little farther up hung over the village, threatening to smother it, you would think. Hours later it was still hanging in the same place, the same shaggy monster with outstretched paws, as though ready to pounce upon the earth. Clouds, clouds, nothing but clouds! Around five o'clock a change took place, darkness gradually enveloped heaven and earth, and soon the clouds disappeared completely, vanishing beneath a black shroud. They were the first to go, next followed the forest and the village, then the church, the chapel, the hamlet, the orchard, and finally the manor-house, several yards away.

It has already become quite dark in the room, and there is no light. So what can one do but pace up and down? A morbid languor seizes Stepan's brain; his entire body, despite its idleness, is filled with an incomprehensible, indescribable feeling of fatigue. Just one thought moves in him and sucks at him—the grave, the grave, the grave! Those black dots which have recently been moving busily on the dark background of the boggy soil and near the village barns are not oppressed by that thought. They will not perish under the burden of despondency and weariness. If they do not challenge the sky directly, at least they struggle, build, make enclosures, repair their houses. Stepan did not question whether all this bustle was worth the while, but he was aware that even the nameless dots were incomparably superior to him, that he couldn't even struggle, that he had nothing to build, nothing to repair.

He spent the evenings in the counting-house, because Arina Petrovna refused to supply him with candles. Several times, through the bailiff, he asked for boots and a fur coat, and was invariably told that boots were not kept in store for him, but that he would be given a pair of felt shoes as soon as the cold spells arrived. Evidently, Arina Petrovna intended to fulfill her program literally, that was, to sustain her son in such a manner as barely to keep him from starvation. At first he abused his mother, but then behaved as though he had forgotten all about her. Even the light of the candles in the counting-room annoyed him, and he began to lock himself in his room and remain all alone in the darkness. There was just a single refuge left, one that he still dreaded but that attracted him irresistibly, to get drunk and forget deeply, irrevocably, to plunge into the sea of oblivion and never emerge again. Everything drove him to it, the debauchery of the past, the enforced idleness of the present, his ailing body with the torturing cough, the unbearable asthma, and the constantly increasing pains in his heart. At last the hour came.

"You must fetch me a bottle of vodka for to-night," he said once to the village clerk in a voice boding little good.

That one bottle of vodka was followed by a long succession of other bottles. After that he got drunk every night. At nine o'clock, when the light in the counting-house had been put out and the servants had retired to their quarters, he placed a bottle of vodka and a slice of rye bread thickly strewn over with salt on the table. He did not attack the liquor at once, but approached it stealthily as it were. Everybody on the place was fast asleep. The mice scudded behind the wall paper and the clock in the counting-house ticked ominously. Stepan threw off his dressing-gown, and began to stride back and forth in the overheated room, with nothing but a shirt on his back. At times he stopped, went over to the table, searched for the bottle in the darkness, then resumed his restless pacing. The first tumblers he emptied in a sort of passion, voluptuously swallowing down the burning liquid. But little by little his heart began to beat faster, the blood mounted to his head, and he mumbled incoherently. His feeble imagination tried to create images, his blunted memory attempted to pierce the mists of the past. But the images were broken and meaningless, and the past remained dim and formless. There was no recollection, either bitter or sweet, as though an impervious wall separated the past from the present.