Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (538 page)

“It’ll be half a rouble, sir; it’s a bad road.”

“Or it wouldn’t be fair to ourselves,” put in the woman.

“Half a rouble? Very good then, half a rouble.
C’est encore mieux; fai en tout quarante roubles mais . . .”

The peasant stopped the horse and by their united efforts Stepan Trofimovitch was dragged into the cart, and seated on the sack by the woman. He was still pursued by the same whirl of ideas. Sometimes he was aware himself that he was terribly absent-minded, and that he was not thinking of what he ought to be thinking of and wondered at it. This consciousness of abnormal weakness of mind became at moments very painful and even humiliating to him.

“How . . . how is this you’ve got a cow behind?” he suddenly asked the woman.

“What do you mean, sir, as though you’d never seen one,” laughed the woman.

“We bought it in the town,” the peasant put in. “Our cattle died last spring . . . the plague. All the beasts have died round us, all of them. There aren’t half of them left, it’s heartbreaking.”

And again he lashed the horse, which had got stuck in a rut.

“Yes, that does happen among you in Russia ... in general we Russians . . . Well, yes, it happens,” Stepan Trofimovitch broke off.

“If you are a teacher, what are you going to Hatovo for? Maybe you are going on farther.”

“I ... I’m not going farther precisely. . . .
C’est-d-dire,
I’m going to a merchant’s.”

“To Spasov, I suppose?”

“Yes, yes, to Spasov. But that’s no matter.”

“If you are going to Spasov and on foot, it will take you a week in your boots,” laughed the woman.

“I dare say, I dare say, no matter,
mes amis,
no matter.” Stepan Trofimovitch cut her short impatiently.

“Awfully inquisitive people; but the woman speaks better than he does, and I notice that since February 19,* their language has altered a little, and . . . and what business is it of mine whether I’m going to Spasov or not? Besides, I’ll pay them, so why do they pester me.”

“If you are going to Spasov, you must take the steamer,” the peasant persisted.

.” That’s true indeed,” the woman put in with animation, “for if you drive along the bank it’s twenty-five miles out of the way.”

“Thirty-five.”

“You’ll just catch the steamer at Ustyevo at two o’clock tomorrow,” the woman decided finally. But Stepan Trofimovitch was obstinately silent. His questioners, too, sank into silence. The peasant tugged at his horse at rare intervals; the peasant woman exchanged brief remarks with him. Stepan Trofimovitch fell into a doze. He was tremendously surprised when the woman, laughing, gave him a poke and he found himself in a rather large village at the door of a cottage with three windows.

“You’ve had a nap, sir?”

“What is it? Where am I? Ah, yes! Well . . . never mind,” sighed Stepan Trofimovitch, and he got out of the cart.

He looked about him mournfully; the village scene seemed strange to him and somehow terribly remote.

*February 19, 1861, the day of the Emancipation of the Serfs, is meant. — Translator’s note.

“And the half-rouble, I was forgetting it!” he said to the peasant, turning to him with an excessively hurried gesture; he was evidently by now afraid to part from them.

“We’ll settle indoors, walk in,” the peasant invited him.

“It’s comfortable inside,” the woman said reassuringly.

Stepan Trofimovitch mounted the shaky steps. “How can it be?” he murmured in profound and apprehensive perplexity. He went into the cottage, however. “
Elle Pa voulu”
he felt a stab at his heart and again he became oblivious of everything, even of the fact that he had gone into the cottage.

It was a light and fairly clean peasant’s cottage, with three windows and two rooms; not exactly an inn, but a cottage at which people who knew the place were accustomed to stop “on their way through the village. Stepan Trofimovitch, quite unembarrassed, went to the foremost corner; forgot to greet anyone, sat down and sank into thought. Meanwhile a sensation of warmth, extremely agreeable after three hours of travelling in the damp, was suddenly diffused throughout his person. Even the slight shivers that spasmodically ran down his spine — such as always occur in particularly nervous people when they are feverish and have suddenly come into a Warm room from the cold — became all at once strangely agreeable. He raised his head and the delicious fragrance of the hot pancakes with which the woman of the house was busy at the stove tickled his nostrils. With a childlike smile he leaned towards the woman and suddenly said:

“What’s that? Are they pancakes?
Mais . . . c’est char-mant.”

“Would you like some, sir?” the woman politely offered him at once.

“I should like some, I certainly should, and . . . may I ask you for some tea too,” said Stepan Trofimovitch, reviving.

“Get the samovar? With the greatest pleasure.”

On a large plate with a big blue pattern on it were served the pancakes — regular peasant pancakes, thin, made half of wheat, covered with fresh hot butter, most delicious pancakes. Stepan Trofimovitch tasted them with relish.

“How rich they are and how good! And if one could only have
un doigt d’eau de vie.”

“It’s a drop of vodka you would like, sir, isn’t it?”

“Just so, just so, a little,
un tout petit
new,”

“Five farthings’ worth, I suppose?”

“Five, yes, five, five, five,
un tout petit rien,”
Stepan Trofimovitch assented with a blissful smile.

Ask a peasant to do anything for you, and if he can, and will, he will serve you with care and friendliness; but ask him to fetch you vodka — and his habitual serenity and friendliness will pass at once into a sort of joyful haste and alacrity; he will be as keen in your interest as though you were one of his family. The peasant who fetches vodka — even though you are going to drink it and not he and he knows that beforehand — seems, as it were, to be enjoying part of your future gratification. Within three minutes (the tavern was only two paces away), a bottle and a large greenish wineglass were set on the table before Stepan Trofimovitch.

“Is that all for me!” He was extremely surprised. “I’ve always had vodka but I never knew you could get so much for five farthings.”

He filled the wineglass, got up and with a certain solemnity crossed the room to the other corner where his fellow-traveller, the black-browed peasant woman, who had shared the sack with him and bothered him with her questions, had ensconced herself. The woman was taken aback, and began to decline, but after having said all that was prescribed by politeness, she stood up and drank it decorously in three sips, as women do, and, with an expression of intense suffering on her face, gave back the wineglass and bowed to Stepan Trofimovitch. He returned the bow with dignity and returned to the table with an expression of positive pride on his countenance.

All this was done on the inspiration of the moment: a second before he had no idea that he would go and treat the peasant woman.

“I know how to get on with peasants to perfection, to perfection, and I’ve always told them so,” he thought complacently, pouring out the rest of the vodka; though there was less than a glass left, it warmed and revived him, and even went a little to his head.

“
Je suis malade tout a- fait, mais ce n’est pas trap mauvais d’etre malade.”

“Would you care to purchase?” a gentle feminine voice asked close by him.

He raised his eyes and to his surprise saw a lady —
une dame, et die en avait Pair,
somewhat over thirty, very modest in appearance, dressed not like a peasant, in a dark gown with a grey shawl on her shoulders. There was something very kindly in her face which attracted Stepan Trofimovitch immediately. She had only just come back to the cottage, where her things had been left on a bench close by the place where Stepan Trofimovitch had seated himself. Among them was a portfolio, at which he remembered he had looked with curiosity on going in, and a pack, not very large, of American leather. From this pack she took out two nicely bound books with a cross engraved on the cover, and offered them to Stepan Trofimovitch.

“
Et . . . mais je croisque c’est I’Evangile . . .
with the greatest pleasure. . . . Ah, now I understand. . . .
Vous etes ce qu’on appelle
a gospel-woman; I’ve read more than once. . . . Half a rouble?”

“Thirty-five kopecks,” answered the gospel-woman. “With the greatest pleasure.
Je n’ai rien centre l’Evangile,
and I’ve been wanting to re-read it for a long time. . . .”

The idea occurred to him at the moment that he had not read the gospel for thirty years at least, and at most had recalled some passages of it, seven years before, when reading Kenan’s “Vie de Jesus.” As he had no small change he pulled out his four ten-rouble notes — all that he had. The woman of the house undertook to get change, and only then he noticed, looking round, that a good many people had come into the cottage, and that they had all been watching him for some time past, and seemed to be talking about him. They were talking too of the fire in the town, especially the owner of the cart who had only just returned from the town with the cow. They talked of arson, of the Shpigulin men.

“He said nothing to me about the fire when he brought me along, although he talked of everything,” struck Stepan Trofimovitch for some reason.

“Master, Stepan Trofimovitch, sir, is it you I see? Well, I never should have thought it! ... Don’t you know me?” exclaimed a middle-aged man who looked like an old-fashioned house-serf, wearing no beard and dressed in an overcoat with a wide turn-down collar. Stepan Trofimovitch was alarmed at hearing his own name.

“Excuse me,” he muttered, “I don’t quite remember you.”

“You don’t remember me. I am Anisim, Anisim Ivanov. I used to be in the service of the late Mr. Gaganov, and many’s the time I’ve seen you, sir, with Varvara Petrovna at the late Avdotya Sergyevna’s. I used to go to you with books from her, and twice I brought you Petersburg sweets from her. . . .”

“Why, yes, I remember you, Anisim,” said Stepan Trofimovitch, smiling. “Do you live here?”

“I live near Spasov, close to the V —— Monastery, in the service of Marta Sergyevna, Avdotya Sergyevna’s sister. Perhaps your honour remembers her; she broke her leg falling out of her carriage on her way to a ball. Now her honour lives near the monastery, and I am in her service. And now as your honour sees, I am on my way to the town to see my kinsfolk.”

“Quite so, quite so.”

“I felt so pleased when I saw you, you used to be so kind to me,” Anisim smiled delightedly. “But where are you travelling to, sir, all by yourself as it seems. . . . You’ve never been a journey alone, I fancy?”

Stepan Trofimovitch looked at him in alarm.

“You are going, maybe, to our parts, to Spasov?”

“Yes, I am going to Spasov.
Il me semble que tout le monde va a Spassof.”

“You don’t say it’s to Fyodor Matveyevitch’s? They will be pleased to see you. He had such a respect for you in old days; he often speaks of you now.”

“Yes, yes, to Fyodor Matveyevitch’s.”

“To be sure, to be sure. The peasants here are wondering; they make out they met you, sir, walking on the high road. They are a foolish lot.”

“I ... I ... Yes, you know, Anisim, I made a wager, you know, like an Englishman, that I would go on foot and I ...”

The perspiration came out on his forehead.

“To be sure, to be sure.” Anisim listened with merciless curiosity. But Stepan Trofimovitch could bear it no longer. He was so disconcerted that he was on the point of getting up and going out of the cottage. But the samovar was brought in, and at the same moment the gospel-woman, who had been out of the room, returned. With the air of a man clutching at a straw he turned to her and offered her tea. Anisim submitted and walked away.

The peasants certainly had begun to feel perplexed: “What sort of person is he? He was found walking on the high road, he says he is a teacher, he is dressed like a foreigner, and has no more sense than a little child; he answers queerly as though he had run away from some one, and he’s got money!” An idea was beginning to gain ground that information must be given to the authorities, “especially as things weren’t quite right in the town.” But Anisim set all that right in a minute. Going into the passage he explained to every one who cared to listen that Stepan Trofimovitch was not exactly a teacher but “a very learned man and busy with very learned studies, and was a landowner of the district himself, and had been living for twenty-two years with her excellency, the general’s widow, the stout Madame Stavrogin, and was by way of being the most important person in her house, and was held in the greatest respect by every one in the town. He used to lose by fifties and hundreds in an evening at the club of the nobility, and in rank he was a councillor, which was equal to a lieutenant-colonel in the army, which was next door to being a colonel. As for his having money, he had so much from the stout Madame Stavrogin that there was no reckoning it” — and so on and so on.

“
Mais c’est une. dame et tres comme il faut,”
thought Stepan Trofimovitch, as he recovered from Anisim’s attack, gazing with agreeable curiosity at his neighbour, the gospel pedlar, who was, however, drinking the tea from a saucer and nibbling at a piece of sugar. “
Ce petit morceau de sucre, ce n’est rien. . . .
There is something noble and independent about her, and at the same time — gentle.
Le comme il faut tout pur,
but rather in a different style.”

He soon learned from her that her name was Sofya Matveyevna Ulitin and she lived at K —— , that she had a sister there, a widow; that she was a widow too, and that her husband, who was a sub-lieutenant risen from the ranks, had been killed at Sevastopol.

“But you are still so young,
vous n’avez pas trente ans.”

“Thirty-four,” said Sofya Matveyevna, smiling.

“What, you understand French?”