But this enthusiastic companionship, like everything else in the world, had to come to an end. As we were both married, and our marriages were tolerably fruitful, we were obliged, for the purpose of supporting our families, to accept situations as family-tutors. By this means we were not infrequently separated, and afterwards were able to spend merely a few weeks in the year together.
[CHAPTER XVIII.]
The Life of a Family-Tutor.
The place, where I first occupied the position of family-tutor, was at the distance of a league from my residence. The family was that of a miserable farmer in a still more miserable village; and my salary was five thalers in Polish money. The poverty, ignorance, and rudeness in the manner of life, which prevailed in this house, were indescribable. The farmer himself was a man of about fifty years, the whole of whose face was overgrown with hair, ending in a dirty, thick beard as black as pitch. His language was a sort of muttering, intelligible only to the boors, with whom he held intercourse daily. Not only was he ignorant of Hebrew, but he could not speak a word of Jewish; his only language was Russian, the common patois of the peasantry. His wife and children were of the same stamp. Moreover, the apartment, in which they lived, was a hovel of smoke, black as coal inside and out, without a chimney, but with merely a small opening in the roof for the exit oi the smoke,—an opening which was carefully closed as soon as the fire was allowed to go out, so that the heat might not escape.
The windows were narrow strips of pine laid crosswise over each other, and covered with paper. This apartment served at once for sitting, drinking, eating, study and sleep. Think of this room intensely heated, and the smoke, as is generally the case in winter, driven back by wind and rain till the whole place is filled with it to suffocation. Here hang a foul washing and other dirty bits of clothing on poles laid across the room in order to kill the vermin with the smoke. There hang sausages to dry, while their fat keeps constantly trickling down on the heads of people below. Yonder stand tubs with sour cabbage and red beets, which form the principal food of the Lithuanians. In a corner the water is kept for daily use, with the dirty water alongside. In this room the bread is kneaded, cooking and baking are done, the cow is milked, and all sorts of operations are carried on.
In this magnificent dwelling the peasants sit on the bare ground; you dare not sit higher if you do not wish to be suffocated with the smoke. Here they guzzle their whiskey and make an uproar, while the people of the house sit in a corner. I usually took my place behind the stove with my dirty half-naked pupils, and expounded to them out of an old tattered Bible, from Hebrew into Russian Jewish. All this together made such a splendid group as deserved to be sketched only by a Hogarth, and to be sung only by a Butler.