Poor Folk and Other Stories (33 page)

We shall not attempt to explain Semyon Ivanovich's fate simply as a result of his fantastical disposition; on the other hand, however, we cannot refrain from observing to the reader that our hero was an unworldly and thoroughly submissive individual, who until the day he had joined the company of his fellow boarders had lived in obscure, impenetrable solitude, and had been distinguished by his quietness and even a certain mysteriousness; for he had spent the whole of the time he had lived at Peski lying on his bed behind the screen, never saying a word and communicating with no one. Both of his former room-mates had lived in exactly the same way as he: they, too, were somewhat mysterious individuals, and had also spend fifteen years lying behind their screens. In the patriarchal calm the happy, somnolent days had drifted by one after the other, and since everything around them had also followed a smooth and uneventful course neither Semyon Ivanovich nor Ustinya Fyodorovna could even remember exactly when fate had brought them together. ‘Oh, it'll be ten years now, no, fifteen, no, twenty-five,' she would sometimes say to her new lodgers, ‘since he settled down with me, poor lamb, bless his little soul.' And so it was perfectly natural that the hero of our tale, unused to company, had been most unpleasantly surprised when, just a year earlier, he had suddenly found himself, a staid and modest man, amidst a noisy, restless throng of a dozen young lads, his new room-mates and companions.

Semyon Ivanovich's disappearance caused no end of a stir in the corners. For a start, he was the favourite lodger; then there was the fact that his passport, which had been in the landlady's safekeeping, proved at about this time to have been accidentally mislaid. Ustinya Fyodorovna set up a wail – a device to which she resorted at all times of crisis; for two days she upbraided her lodgers and heaped abuse on them; she wailed that they had driven her lodger away like a chicken, and that ‘all those wicked mockers' had been the ruin of
him; on the third day she shooed them all out of the house and sent them off to find the fugitive and bring him home at whatever cost, dead or alive. In the evening first copying-clerk Sudbin returned to say that the trail had been found, that he had seen the fugitive in Tolkuchy Market
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and other places, had followed him and stood near him but had not dared to speak to him, though he had even been a near bystander of his in a crowd of people watching a house on fire in Krivoy Lane.
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Half an hour later Okeanov and the
raznoch-inets
Kantarev appeared, and confirmed what Sudbin had said word for word: they had also stood not far from Semyon Ivanovich, had passed close to him, only ten paces away from him, but theyhad not dared to talk to him either; they both remarked that he had been in the company of a drunken beggar. Finally the other lodgers turned up, too, and having heard the others out attentively, decided that Prokharchin could not be fear away and would soon show up; they said, however, that they had all known he was going around with a drunken beggar. The drunkenbeggar was a thoroughly unpleasant character, unruly and smooth-tongued, and it seemed quite plain that Semyon Ivanovich had somehow been taken in by him. He had appeared, together with their mutual companion Remnev, just a week before Semyon Ivanovich had gone missing, had stayed in the corners for a short while sponging off people, said he was suffering for the sake of truth, that previously he had been a civil servant in the outlying districts, that an inspector general had had itin for them, that he and his companions had been given the sack just for telling the truth, that he had come to St Petersburg and fallen at the feet of Porfiry Grigoryevich, that following Porfiry Grigoryevich's intercession he had founda place in a certain office, but that, through the cruellest stroke of ill-fortune, he had been dismissed from that post too, as the office itself had been closed down as a result of certain alterations; that he had not been accepted into the new, revised staff of clerks, as much on account of his sheer incompetence for the work involved as for his competence in relation to another, completely irrelevant matter – and, in addition, on account of his love of truth, and the machinationsof his enemies. When he had finished this story, during the narration of which Mr Zimoveykin several times kissed and embraced his surly and unshaven friend Remnev, he bowed to the feet of each of the people in the room in turn, not even forgetting Avdotya the serving-maid, called them all his benefactors and explained that he was an
unworthy, importunate, base, unruly and stupid man, and that good people should not judge his miserable lot and simple nature too severely. Having thus solicited the favour of his listeners, Mr Zimo-veykin revealed himself to be a jovial fellow, became the soul of cheerfulness, kissed Ustinya Fyodorovna's hands, in spite of her modest protestations that her hands were common and not refined, and as the evening drew near promised to demonstrate his talent to the entire company in a remarkable
danse caractéristique.
On the following day, however, his act concluded in a sad dénouement. Whether it was that his dance had been just a shade too characterful, or whether it was that Ustinya Fyodorovna, to use her own words, had felthe had disgraced her and made a fool of her, while she was ‘friendly with Yaroslav Ilyich himself', and could have, if she had wanted to, long ago become ‘an ober-officer's wife' – whatever the reason was, Zimoveykin had to clear off home. He had left, returned again, been ignominously turfed out a second time, then insinuated himself into Semyon Ivanovich's attention and good graces, relieved him in passing of his new breeches and had now finally emerged as Semyon Ivanovich's tempter.

As soon as the landlady was certain that Semyon Ivanovich was alive and well, and that there was now no need to go hunting for his passport, she immediately stopped fretting and began to calm down. At the same time some of the lodgers decided to give the fugitive a royal welcome: they smashed the bolt and removed the screen from around the prodigal's bed, rumpled up the bedclothes a little, took the famous trunk and placed it at the foot of the bed, and in the bed itself they put an effigy of Mr Prokharchin's sister-in-law made from one of the landlady's old shawls, a cap and acoat, an effigy so lifelike that anyone might easily have been deceived. When they had completed their work, they began towait for Semyon Ivanovich to return, intending to tell him that his sister-in-law had arrived from Tver and had made herself at home behind his screen, poor woman. But they waited and waited… While they were waiting, Mark Ivanovich even managed to stake and lose half a month's salary to the lodgers Prepolovenko and Kantarev; Okeanov's nose grew red and swollen from their games of ‘noses' and ‘three leaves'
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Avdotya the serving-maid had practically the equivalent of a full night's sleep and got up twice to bring in firewood and light the stove; and Zinovy Prokofyevich, who kept dashing out into the yard every minute or so to see if Semyon Ivanovich was coming,
got wet to the skin; but still no one appeared – neither Semyon Ivanovich, nor the drunken beggar. At last they all went to bed, leaving the effigy of the sister-in-law behind Mr Prokharchin's screen just in case he should turn up; and not until four o'clock in the morning was there a knock at the front door, so very loud that it thoroughly compensated the waiting residents for all the arduous labours they had undertaken. It was he, none other than the man himself, Semyon Ivanovich, Mr Prokharchin, only in such a condition that they all gasped out loud, and none of them even gave a thought to the sister-in-law. The prodigal had returned unconscious. He was brought, or rather carried in by a soaked and shivering cabby, heaving him on his shoulders. In response to the landlady's query as to where the miserable fellow had drunk himself into such a state, the cabby replied: ‘He isn't drunk, hasn't had a drop, I can tell you that for afact; he's probably fainted, or been hit by something, or maybe he's had a stroke.' They set about examining the culprit, propping him up against the stove for convenience, and saw that this was a case neither of drunkenness nor of stroke, but of some other disorder, for Semyon Ivanovich could not move his tongue, and seemed to be twitching in some kind of convulsions; all he could do was fix a blank stare of bewilderment first on one, then on another of his nocturnally attired spectators. Then they began asking the cabby where he had picked Mr Prokharchin up. ‘Well, he was with some fellows from Kolomna,' he replied. ‘The devil knows who they were, not exactly what you might call gentlemen, but cherry gents who were out having a good time; he was like this when they gave him to me; I don't know, maybe they'd had a fight, or maybe he'd been taken with some fit or other, God knows what had happened; but they were cheery, decent sort of gents!' Semyon Ivanovich was taken, lifted on to a pair or so of hefty shoulders and carried to his bed. As he straightened himself out in it, he felt the effigy of his sister-in-law beside him and put his feet against his cherished trunk. He uttered a shriek at the top of his voice, sat up almost in a squatting position and, trembling and quivering all over, raked and cleared with his hands as much space in his bed as he could; as he did so he surveyed those present with a flickering but strangely determined gaze; he seemed to be saying that he would rather die than yield to anyone so much as a hundredth part of his meagre bounty…

For two or three days Semyon Ivanovich lay tightly boarded in
behind his screen and thus detached from the whole wide world and all its vain commotion. As might be expected, by thefollowing morning everyone had forgotten about him; and meanwhile time flew by in its usual manner, hour followed hour andday followed day. With a head burning and made heavy by fever, the sick man lay in a state that was half dream and half delirium; but he lay quietly, without moaning or complaining; indeed, he kept very still, made no sound and exercised restraint, flattening himself against his bed the way a hare crouches on the ground in terror at the sound of the hunt. From time to time a long, melancholy silence reigned in the apartment – a sign that all the lodgers had gone to work, and then Semyon Ivanovich, waking from slumber, could relieve his anguished state of mind by listening to the noise in the kitchen close by, where the landlady was bustling about, or to the regular slap of Avdotya the serving-maid's worn-out shoes as she made her way through all the rooms, sighing and groaning, tidying, polishing and dusting all the corners for the sake of order. In this fashion whole hours went by, drowsy, indolent, sleepy, tedious hours like the water that dripped evenly and resonantly from the bench into the washtub in the kitchen. At last the lodgers would return, singly or in groups, and Semyon Ivanovich would without any difficulty at all hear them cursing the weather and saying how hungry they were, and then creating a hubbub as they smoked, waxed sociable with one another, played cards and rattled the cups as they got ready to have tea. Semyon Ivanovich made a mechanical effort to get up and join them in his time-honoured manner for the preparation of the beverage, but immediately fell back asleep again and dreamed that he had already been sitting at the tea table for a long time, chatting and taking part in the conversation, and that Zinovy Prokofyevich had taken advantage of the opportunity to bring up the question of a certain project concerning sisters-in-law and the moral attitude of certain goodmen towards them. Here Semyon Ivanovich had hastened to defend himself and make his due retort, but the imposingly formal phrase ‘it has on several occasions been observed' which flew from every tongue put an end to his objectionsin no uncertain manner, and Semyon Ivanovich could think of nothing else but to start dreaming again that today was the first of the month and that he was being paid his silver rubles in the office where he worked. Opening the envelope on the staircase, he took a quick look around him, hurriedly counted off half of his rightful wages and his the
money in his boot. Then, still on the staircase and quite regardless of the fact that he was really doing all this in bed, asleep, he decided that when he got home he would immediately give his landlady the money he owed her for board and lodging, then to buy a few items of necessity and demonstrate to those concerned, in a casual and seemingly unintentional manner, that a deduction had been made from his salary, and that now he had nothing to send his sister-in-law – following this up at once with a resolve to commiserate with his sister-in-law, to talk a great deal about her the next day and the day after that, and to allude to her poverty again in ten days' time, so that his colleagues should not forget. Having made this decision, he saw that Andrey Yefimovich, the short, eternally silent, bald little man who had a desk in the office diree rooms along from the one where Semyon Ivanovich had his and who had not said a word to him for the past twenty years, was standing near him on the staircase, also counting his silver rubles. ‘Money!' Andrey Yefimovich said to him, with a shake of his head. ‘If there's no money, there's no bacon,' he added grimly, going downstairs. In the doorway he said, by way of conclusion: ‘I have seven, sir.' Here the bald littleman, who was also doubtless perfectly unaware that he was acting in the form of an apparition and not as a part of waking reality, lowered one hand to a point about two and a half feet above the floor and, waving it in a descending line, mumbledthat the eldest was attending gymnasium; then, giving Semyon Ivanovich an indignant glance, as though it were Mr Prokharchin who was responsible for the fact that he ‘had seven', Andrey Yefimovich pulled his hat down over his eyes, gave his overcoat a shake, turned to the left and was gone. Semyon Ivanovich had received a considerable fright, and even though he was quite certain of his innocence with regard to the unlucky concurrence of seven children under the same roof, it did in the end seem to be the case that Semyon Ivanovich was in fact to blame. In sudden fear he began to run, for the bald gentleman seemed to be coming back in order to catch him up, with the intention of searching him and taking away all his salary, supporting his claim with reference to the inalienable number seven and firmly rejecting the considerationsof any sisters-in-law Semyon Ivanovich might have. Mr Prokharchin ran and ran, panting for breath… Running alongside him were other clerks, in great numbers, and they were all jingling their salaries in the rear pockets of their dress jackets, which were short and far too tight; in the end a whole mass of people came running
up, there was a trumpeting of fire-alarms, and great waves of humanity swept him along on their shoulders to the very fire he had witnessed together with the drunken beggar. Thedrunkard – otherwise known as Mr Zimoveykin – proved to be already on the spot, greeted Semyon Ivanovich in a dreadful state of agitation, seized him by the arm and led him into the verythick of the crowd. Just as it had been before in waking reality, around them clamoured and hooted a vast sea of people, which was dammed between the two bridges of the Fontanka Embankment and took up all the surrounding streets and lanes as well; just as before, Semyon Ivanovich and the drunkard were swept along behind some kind of fence, where they were held jammed, as though in a pair of pincers, in an enormous wood-yard full of spectators who had arrived from the streets, from Tolkuchy Market and from all the surrounding houses, inns and cafés. Semyon Ivanovich beheld it all as he had done before, and with the same emotions; in the whirl of fever and delirium certain strange faces began to flicker before his eyes. He remembered some of them. One of them belonged to the very same gentleman who had produced such an impression on everyone, seven feet tall and with whiskers a couple of feet long, who during the actual fire had stood behind Semyon Ivanovich and had urged him on when our hero, in the grip of something resembling ecstasy, had stamped his little feet as though in this manner to applaud the work of the gallant fire brigade, of which he had an excellent view from his elevated vantage-point. Another was the face of the burly fellow from whom our hero had received a punch masquerading as a lift on to another fence, when he had nearly been about to climb over the first one, possibly in order to save someone. He also glimpsed the form of the old man with the haemorrhoidal face who had been wearing a tattered, cotton-padded dressing-gown tied around the midriff with something or another, who before the onset of the fire had slipped out to the corner shop for rusks and tobacco for his lodger and who was now, clutching a milk-jug and a quart measure, fighting his way through the crowd to the house where his wife, daughter and thirty and a half rubles under the feather mattress in the corner were all going upin flames. Most clearly of all, however, he saw the poor, sinful woman of whom he had already dreamt more than once in the course of his illness. She appeared to him now as she had done then, in bast shoes, holding a crutch, a wicker basket on her back, her clothes in tatters. She was shouting louder than the
firemen and the crowd, brandishing her crutch and waving her arms about, telling everyone that her own children had turned her out and that she had lost two five-copeck pieces in the process. The children and five copecks, five copecks and the children – the words spun round on her tongue in an obscure, unintelligible jabber, on which all had turned their back safter fruitless efforts at comprehension; but the woman would not quieten down, she kept shouting, wailing and flailing her arms about, seeming to pay no attention either to the fire, to which she had been swept along by the crowd from the street, or to the rabble which surrounded her on all sides, or to the misfortune of others, or even to the smouldering brands and sparks with which the bystanders were already beginning to be showered. Finally Mr Prokharchin felt an attack of terror coming on; for he could clearly see that there was some hidden design behind all this, and that he was not going to get away unscathed. And indeed, there, not far away from him, clambering up on to the woodpile was a muzhik of some kind dressed in a torn, unbelted cloth coat, his hair and beard both singed, who began to incite the whole vast crowd against Semyon I vanovich. The crowd grew denser and denser, the muzhik continued to shout and, rigid with horror, Mr Prokharchin suddenlyrealized that the muzhik was a cabby whom, only five days earlier, he had cheated in the most inhuman manner, giving him the slip without paying his fare, darting through a side entrance and kicking up his heels as he ran as though he were fleeing across a red-hot stove. The desperate Mr Prokharchin tried to speak, to shout, but his voice had failed him. He felt the whole infuriated crowd coiling around him like a multicoloured snake, crushing him and choking him. He made one final, extraordinary effort – and woke up. Then he saw that he was on fire, that his screens were on fire, that the whole apartment was on fire, together with Ustinya Fyodorovna and all her paying guests, that his bed, his pillow, his quilt, his trunk and, finally, his precious mattress – all were on fire. Semyon Ivanovich leapt up, grabbed hold of his mattress and fled, dragging it after him. But when our hero entered the landlady's room, into which he had run exactly as he was, without a stitch of decency, barefoot and in his nightshirt, the lodgers intercepted him, pinioned his arms and carried him triumphantly back behind his screen, which, incidentally, had not caught fire at all, the fire being rather inside Semyon Ivanovich's brain – and put him to bed. In just such a fashion might a ragged, surly and unshaven organ-grinder
put away in his travelling box his Punchinello, who has indulged in brawls, battered and broken everyone else, sold hissoul to the devil and is at last ceasing his existence until the next performance, in the same box as the devil, the blackamoors, Petrushka, Mademoiselle Katerina and her lucky lover, the district police captain.