The deputy examining magistrate and the district doctor were going to an inquest in the village of Syrnya. On the road they were overtaken by a snowstorm; they spent a long time going round and round and arrived, not at midday, as they had intended, but in the evening when it was dark. They put up for the night at the Zemstvo hut. It so happened that it was in this hut that the dead body was lying the corpse of the Zemstvo insurance agent, Lesnitsky, who had arrived in Syrnya three days before and, ordering the samovar in the hut, had shot himself, to the great surprise of everyone; and the fact that he had ended his life so strangely, after unpacking his eatables and laying them out on the table, and with the samovar before him, led many people to suspect that it was a case of murder; an inquest was necessary.
In the outer room, the doctor and the examining magistrate shook the snow off themselves and knocked it off their boots. And meanwhile, the old village constable, Ilya Loshadin, stood by, holding a little tin lamp. There was a strong smell of paraffin.
“Who are you?” asked the doctor.
“Conshtable . . .” answered the constable.
He used to spell it “conshtable” when he signed the receipts at the post office.
“And where are the witnesses?”
“They must have gone to tea, your honor.”
On the right was the parlor, the travelers’ or gentry’s room; on the left the kitchen, with a big stove and sleeping shelves under the rafters. The doctor and the examining magistrate, followed by the constable, holding the lamp high above his head, went into the parlor. Here a still, long body covered with white linen was lying on the floor close to the table-legs. In the dim light of the lamp they could clearly see, besides the white covering, new rubber goloshes, and everything about it was uncanny and sinister: the dark walls, and the silence, and the goloshes, and the stillness of the dead body. On the table stood a samovar, cold long ago; and round it parcels, probably the eatables.
“To shoot oneself in the Zemstvo hut, how tactless!” said the doctor. “If one does want to put a bullet through one’s brains, one ought to do it at home in some outhouse.”
He sank on to a bench, just as he was, in his cap, his fur coat, and his felt overboots; his fellow-traveler, the examining magistrate, sat down opposite.
“These hysterical, neurasthenic people are great egoists,” the doctor went on hotly. “If a neurasthenic sleeps in the same room with you, he rustles his newspaper; when he dines with you, he gets up a scene with his wife without troubling about your presence; and when he feels inclined to shoot himself, he shoots himself in a village in a Zemstvo hut, so as to give the maximum of trouble to everybody. These gentlemen in every circumstance of life think of no one but themselves! That’s why the elderly so dislike our ‘nervous age.'”
“The elderly dislike so many things,” said the examining magistrate, yawning. “You should point out to the elder generation what the difference is between the suicides of the past and the suicides of to-day. In the old days the so-called gentleman shot himself because he had made away with Government money, but nowadays it is because he is sick of life, depressed. . . . Which is better?”
“Sick of life, depressed; but you must admit that he might have shot himself somewhere else.”
“Such trouble!” said the constable, “such trouble! It’s a real affliction. The people are very much upset, your honor; they haven’t slept these three nights. The children are crying. The cows ought to be milked, but the women won’t go to the stall they are afraid . . . for fear the gentleman should appear to them in the darkness. Of course, they are silly women, but some of the men are frightened too. As soon as it is dark they won’t go by the hut one by one, but only in a flock together. And the witnesses too. . . .”
Dr. Startchenko, a middle-aged man in spectacles with a dark beard, and the examining magistrate Lyzhin, a fair man, still young, who had only taken his degree two years before and looked more like a student than an official, sat in silence, musing. They were vexed that they were late. Now they had to wait till morning, and to stay here for the night, though it was not yet six o’clock; and they had before them a long evening, a dark night, boredom, uncomfortable beds, beetles, and cold in the morning; and listening to the blizzard that howled in the chimney and in the loft, they both thought how unlike all this was the life which they would have chosen for themselves and of which they had once dreamed, and how far away they both were from their contemporaries, who were at that moment walking about the lighted streets in town without noticing the weather, or were getting ready for the theatre, or sitting in their studies over a book. Oh, how much they would have given now only to stroll along the Nevsky Prospect, or along Petrovka in Moscow, to listen to decent singing, to sit for an hour or so in a restaurant!
“Oo-oo-oo-oo!” sang the storm in the loft, and something outside slammed viciously, probably the signboard on the hut. “Oo-oo-oo-oo!”
“You can do as you please, but I have no desire to stay here,” said Startchenko, getting up. “It’s not six yet, it’s too early to go to bed; I am off. Von Taunitz lives not far from here, only a couple of miles from Syrnya. I shall go to see him and spend the evening there. Constable, run and tell my coachman not to take the horses out. And what are you going to do?” he asked Lyzhin.
“I don’t know; I expect I shall go to sleep.”
The doctor wrapped himself in his fur coat and went out. Lyzhin could hear him talking to the coachman and the bells beginning to quiver on the frozen horses. He drove off.
“It is not nice for you, sir, to spend the night in here,” said the constable; “come into the other room. It’s dirty, but for one night it won’t matter. I’ll get a samovar from a peasant and heat it directly. I’ll heap up some hay for you, and then you go to sleep, and God bless you, your honor.”
A little later the examining magistrate was sitting in the kitchen drinking tea, while Loshadin, the constable, was standing at the door talking. He was an old man about sixty, short and very thin, bent and white, with a nave smile on his face and watery eyes and he kept smacking with his lips as though he were sucking a sweetmeat. He was wearing a short sheepskin coat and high felt boots, and held his stick in his hands all the time. The youth of the examining magistrate aroused his compassion, and that was probably why he addressed him familiarly.
“The elder gave orders that he was to be informed when the police superintendent or the examining magistrate came,” he said, “so I suppose I must go now. . . . It’s nearly three miles to the volost, and the storm, the snowdrifts, are something terrible maybe one won’t get there before midnight. Ough! How the wind roars!”
“I don’t need the elder,” said Lyzhin. “There is nothing for him to do here.”
He looked at the old man with curiosity and asked:
“Tell me, grandfather, how many years have you been constable?”
“How many? Why, thirty years. Five years after the Freedom I began going as constable, that’s how I reckon it. And from that time I have been going every day since. Other people have holidays, but I am always going. When it’s Easter and the church bells are ringing and Christ has risen, I still go about with my bag to the treasury, to the post, to the police superintendent’s lodgings, to the rural captain, to the tax inspector, to the municipal office, to the gentry, to the peasants, to all orthodox Christians. I carry parcels, notices, tax papers, letters, forms of different sorts, circulars, and to be sure, kind gentleman, there are all sorts of forms nowadays, so as to note down the numbers yellow, white, and red and every gentleman or priest or well-to-do peasant must write down a dozen times in the year how much he has sown and harvested, how many quarters or poods he has of rye, how many of oats, how many of hay, and what the weather’s like, you know, and insects, too, of all sorts. To be sure you can write what you like, it’s only a regulation, but one must go and give out the notices and then go again and collect them. Here, for instance, there’s no need to cut open the gentleman; you know yourself it’s a silly thing, it’s only dirtying your hands, and here you have been put to trouble, your honor; you have come because it’s the regulation; you can’t help it. For thirty years I have been going round according to regulation. In the summer it is all right, it is warm and dry, but in winter and autumn it’s uncomfortable At times I have been almost drowned and almost frozen; all sorts of things have happened wicked people set on me in the forest and took away my bag; I have been beaten, and I have been before a court of law.”
“What were you accused of?”
“Of fraud.”
“How do you mean?”
“Why, you see, Hrisanf Grigoryev, the clerk, sold the contractor some boards belonging to someone else cheated him, in fact. I was mixed up in it. They sent me to the tavern for vodka; well, the clerk did not share with me did not even offer me a glass; but as through my poverty I was in appearance, I mean not a man to be relied upon, not a man of any worth, we were both brought to trial; he was sent to prison, but, praise God! I was acquitted on all points. They read a notice, you know, in the court. And they were all in uniforms in the court, I mean. I can tell you, your honor, my duties for anyone not used to them are terrible, absolutely killing; but to me it is nothing. In fact, my feet ache when I am not walking. And at home, it is worse for me. At home, one has to heat the stove for the clerk in the volost office, to fetch water for him, to clean his boots.”
“And what wages do you get?” Lyzhin asked.
“Eighty-four roubles a year.”
“I’ll bet you get other little sums coming in. You do, don’t you?”
“Other little sums? No, indeed! Gentlemen nowadays don’t often give tips. Gentlemen nowadays are strict, they take offense at anything. If you bring them a notice they are offended, if you take off your cap before them they are offended. ‘You have come to the wrong entrance,’ they say. ‘You are a drunkard,’ they say. ‘You smell of onion; you are a blockhead; you are the son of a bitch.’ There are kind-hearted ones, of course; but what does one get from them? They only laugh and call one all sorts of names. Mr. Altuhin, for instance, he is a good-natured gentleman; and if you look at him he seems sober and in his right mind, but so soon as he sees me he shouts and does not know what he means himself. He gave me such a name ‘You,’ said he . . .” The constable uttered some word, but in such a low voice that it was impossible to make out what he said.
“What?” Lyzhin asked. “Say it again.”
“Administration,” the constable repeated aloud. “He has been calling me that for a long while, for the last six years. ‘Hullo, Administration!’ But I don’t mind; let him, God bless him! Sometimes a lady will send one a glass of vodka and a bit of pie and one drinks to her health. But peasants give more; peasants are more kind-hearted, they have the fear of God in their hearts: one will give a bit of bread, another a drop of cabbage soup, another will stand one a glass. The village elders treat one to tea in the tavern. Here the witnesses have gone to their tea. ‘Loshadin,’ they said, ‘you stay here and keep watch for us,’ and they gave me a kopeck each. You see, they are frightened, not being used to it, and yesterday they gave me fifteen kopecks and offered me a glass.”
“And you aren’t you frightened?”
“I am, sir; but of course it is my duty, there is no getting away from it. In the summer I was taking a convict to the town, and he set upon me and gave me such a drubbing! And all around were fields, forest how could I get away from him? It’s just the same here. I remember the gentleman, Mr. Lesnitsky, when he was so high, and I knew his father and mother. I am from the village of Nedoshtchotova, and they, the Lesnitsky family, were not more than three-quarters of a mile from us and less than that, their ground next to ours, and Mr. Lesnitsky had a sister, a God-fearing and tender-hearted lady. Lord keep the soul of Thy servant Yulya, eternal memory to her! She was never married, and when she was dying she divided all her property; she left three hundred acres to the monastery, and six hundred to the commune of peasants of Nedoshtchotova to commemorate her soul; but her brother hid the will, they do say burnt it in the stove, and took all this land for himself. He thought, to be sure, it was for his benefit; but nay, wait a bit, you won’t get on in the world through injustice, brother. The gentleman did not go to confession for twenty years after. He kept away from the church, to be sure, and died impenitent. He burst. He was a very fat man, so he burst lengthways. Then everything was taken from the young master, from Seryozha, to pay the debts everything there was. Well, he had not gone very far in his studies, he couldn’t do anything, and the president of the Rural Board, his uncle ‘I’ll take him’ Seryozha, I mean thinks he, ‘for an agent; let him collect the insurance, that’s not a difficult job,’ and the gentleman was young and proud, he wanted to be living on a bigger scale and in better style and with more freedom. To be sure it was a come-down for him to be jolting about the district in a wretched cart and talking to the peasants; he would walk and keep looking on the ground, looking on the ground and saying nothing; if you called his name right in his ear, ‘Sergey Sergeyitch!’ he would look round like this, ‘Eh?’ and look down on the ground again, and now you see he has laid hands on himself. There’s no sense in it, your honor, it’s not right, and there’s no making out what’s the meaning of it, merciful Lord! Say your father was rich and you are poor; it is mortifying, there’s no doubt about it, but there, you must make up your mind to it. I used to live in good style, too; I had two horses, your honor, three cows, I used to keep twenty head of sheep; but the time has come, and I am left with nothing but a wretched bag, and even that is not mine but Government property. And now in our Nedoshtchotova, if the truth is to be told, my house is the worst of the lot. Makey had four footmen, and now Makey is a footman himself. Petrak had four laborers, and now Petrak is a laborer himself.”
“How was it you became poor?” asked the examining magistrate.
“My sons drink terribly. I could not tell you how they drink, you wouldn’t believe it.”
Lyzhin listened and thought how he, Lyzhin, would go back sooner or later to Moscow, while this old man would stay here forever, and would always be walking and walking. And how many times in his life he would come across such battered, unkempt old men, not “men of any worth,” in whose souls fifteen kopecks, glasses of vodka, and a profound belief that you can’t get on in this life by dishonesty, were equally firmly rooted.
Then he grew tired of listening, and told the old man to bring him some hay for his bed, There was an iron bedstead with a pillow and a quilt in the traveler’s room, and it could be fetched in; but the dead man had been lying by it for nearly three days (and perhaps sitting on it just before his death), and it would be disagreeable to sleep upon it now. . . .
“It’s only half-past seven,” thought Lyzhin, glancing at his watch. “How awful it is!”
He was not sleepy, but having nothing to do to pass away the time, he lay down and covered himself with a rug. Loshadin went in and out several times, clearing away the tea-things; smacking his lips and sighing, he kept tramping round the table; at last he took his little lamp and went out, and, looking at his long, gray-headed, bent figure from behind, Lyzhin thought:
“Just like a magician in an opera.”
It was dark. The moon must have been behind the clouds, as the windows and the snow on the window-frames could be seen distinctly.
“Oo-oo-oo!” sang the storm, “Oo-oo-oo-oo!”
“Ho-ho-ly sa-aints!” wailed a woman in the loft, or it sounded like it. “Ho-ho-ly sa-aints!”
“B-booh!” something outside banged against the wall. “Trah!”
The examining magistrate listened: there was no woman up there, it was the wind howling. It was rather cold, and he put his fur coat over his rug. As he got warm he thought how remote all this the storm, and the hut, and the old man, and the dead body lying in the next room how remote it all was from the life he desired for himself, and how alien it all was to him, how petty, how uninteresting. If this man had killed himself in Moscow or somewhere in the neighborhood, and he had had to hold an inquest on him there, it would have been interesting, important, and perhaps he might even have been afraid to sleep in the next room to the corpse. Here, nearly a thousand miles from Moscow, all this was seen somehow in a different light; it was not life, they were not human beings, but something only existing “according to the regulation,” as Loshadin said; it would leave not the faintest trace in the memory and would be forgotten as soon as he, Lyzhin, drove away from Syrnya. The fatherland, the real Russia, was Moscow, Petersburg; but here he was in the provinces, the colonies. When one dreamed of playing a leading part, of becoming a popular figure, of being, for instance, examining magistrate in particularly important cases or prosecutor in a circuit court, of being a society lion, one always thought of Moscow. To live, one must be in Moscow; here one cared for nothing, one grew easily resigned to one’s insignificant position, and only expected one thing of life to get away quickly, quickly. And Lyzhin mentally moved about the Moscow streets, went into the familiar houses, met his kindred, his comrades, and there was a sweet pang at his heart at the thought that he was only twenty-six, and that if in five or ten years he could break away from here and get to Moscow, even then it would not be too late and he would still have a whole life before him. And as he sank into unconsciousness, as his thoughts began to be confused, he imagined the long corridor of the court at Moscow, himself delivering a speech, his sisters, the orchestra which for some reason kept droning: “Oo-oo-oo-oo! Oo-oooo-oo!”
“Booh! Trah!” sounded again. “Booh!”
And he suddenly recalled how one day, when he was talking to the bookkeeper in the little office of the Rural Board, a thin, pale gentleman with black hair and dark eyes walked in; he had a disagreeable look in his eyes such as one sees in people who have slept too long after dinner, and it spoilt his delicate, intelligent profile; and the high boots he was wearing did not suit him, but looked clumsy. The bookkeeper had introduced him: “This is our insurance agent.”
“So that was Lesnitsky . . . this same man,” Lyzhin reflected now.
He recalled Lesnitsky’s soft voice, imagined his gait, and it seemed to him that someone was walking beside him now with a step like Lesnitsky’s.
All at once he felt frightened, his head turned cold.
“Who’s there?” he asked in alarm.
“The conshtable!”
“What do you want here?”
“I have come to ask, your honor you said this evening that you did not want the elder, but I am afraid he may be angry. He told me to go to him. Shouldn’t I go?”
“That’s enough, you bother me,” said Lyzhin with vexation, and he covered himself up again.
“He may be angry. . . . I’ll go, your honor. I hope you will be comfortable,” and Loshadin went out.
In the passage there was coughing and subdued voices. The witnesses must have returned.
“We’ll let those poor beggars get away early to-morrow . . .” thought the examining magistrate; “we’ll begin the inquest as soon as it is daylight.”
He began sinking into forgetfulness when suddenly there were steps again, not timid this time but rapid and noisy. There was the slam of a door, voices, the scratching of a match. . . .
“Are you asleep? Are you asleep?” Dr. Startchenko was asking him hurriedly and angrily as he struck one match after another; he was covered with snow and brought a chill air in with him. “Are you asleep? Get up! Let us go to Von Taunitz’s. He has sent his own horses for you. Come along. There, at any rate, you will have supper, and sleep like a human being. You see I have come for you myself. The horses are splendid; we shall get there in twenty minutes.”
“And what time is it now?”
“A quarter past ten.”
Lyzhin, sleepy and discontented, put on his felt overboots, his furlined coat, his cap, and hood, and went out with the doctor. There was not a very sharp frost, but a violent and piercing wind was blowing and driving along the street the clouds of snow which seemed to be racing away in terror: high drifts were heaped up already under the fences and at the doorways. The doctor and the examining magistrate got into the sledge, and the white coachman bent over them to button up the cover. They were both hot.
“Ready!”
They drove through the village. “Cutting a feathery furrow,” thought the examining magistrate, listlessly watching the action of the trace horse’s legs. There were lights in all the huts, as though it were the eve of a great holiday: the peasants had not gone to bed because they were afraid of the dead body. The coachman preserved a sullen silence, probably he had felt dreary while he was waiting by the Zemstvo hut, and now he, too, was thinking of the dead man.
“At the Von Taunitz’s,” said Startchenko, “they all set upon me when they heard that you were left to spend the night in the hut, and asked me why I did not bring you with me.”
As they drove out of the village, at the turning the coachman suddenly shouted at the top of his voice: “Out of the way!”
They caught a glimpse of a man: he was standing up to his knees in the snow, moving off the road and staring at the horses. The examining magistrate saw a stick with a crook, and a beard and a bag, and he fancied that it was Loshadin, and even fancied that he was smiling. He flashed by and disappeared.
The road ran at first along the edge of the forest, then along a broad forest clearing; they caught glimpses of old pines and a young birch copse, and tall, gnarled young oak trees standing singly in the clearings where the wood had lately been cut; but soon it was all merged in the clouds of snow. The coachman said he could see the forest; the examining magistrate could see nothing but the trace horse. The wind blew on their backs.
All at once the horses stopped.
“Well, what is it now?” asked Startchenko crossly.
The coachman got down from the box without a word and began running round the sledge, treading on his heels; he made larger and larger circles, getting further and further away from the sledge, and it looked as though he were dancing; at last he came back and began to turn off to the right.
“You’ve got off the road, eh?” asked Startchenko.
“It’s all ri-ight. . . .”
Then there was a little village and not a single light in it. Again the forest and the fields. Again they lost the road, and again the coachman got down from the box and danced round the sledge. The sledge flew along a dark avenue, flew swiftly on. And the heated trace horse’s hoofs knocked against the sledge. Here there was a fearful roaring sound from the trees, and nothing could be seen, as though they were flying on into space; and all at once the glaring light at the entrance and the windows flashed upon their eyes, and they heard the good-natured, drawn-out barking of dogs. They had arrived.
While they were taking off their fur coats and their felt boots below, “Un Petit Verre de Clicquot” was being played upon the piano overhead, and they could hear the children beating time with their feet. Immediately on going in they were aware of the snug warmth and special smell of the old apartments of a mansion where, whatever the weather outside, life is so warm and clean and comfortable.
“That’s capital!” said Von Taunitz, a fat man with an incredibly thick neck and with whiskers, as he shook the examining magistrate’s hand. “That’s capital! You are very welcome, delighted to make your acquaintance. We are colleagues to some extent, you know. At one time I was deputy prosecutor; but not for long, only two years. I came here to look after the estate, and here I have grown old an old fogey, in fact. You are very welcome,” he went on, evidently restraining his voice so as not to speak too loud; he was going upstairs with his guests. “I have no wife, she’s dead. But here, I will introduce my daughters,” and turning round, he shouted down the stairs in a voice of thunder: “Tell Ignat to have the sledge ready at eight o’clock to-morrow morning.”
His four daughters, young and pretty girls, all wearing gray dresses and with their hair done up in the same style, and their cousin, also young and attractive, with her children, were in the drawing-room. Startchenko, who knew them already, began at once begging them to sing something, and two of the young ladies spent a long time declaring they could not sing and that they had no music; then the cousin sat down to the piano, and with trembling voices, they sang a duet from “The Queen of Spades.” Again “Un Petit Verre de Clicquot” was played, and the children skipped about, beating time with their feet. And Startchenko pranced about too. Everybody laughed.
Then the children said good-night and went off to bed. The examining magistrate laughed, danced a quadrille, flirted, and kept wondering whether it was not all a dream? The kitchen of the Zemstvo hut, the heap of hay in the corner, the rustle of the beetles, the revolting poverty-stricken surroundings, the voices of the witnesses, the wind, the snowstorm, the danger of being lost; and then all at once this splendid, brightly lighted room, the sounds of the piano, the lovely girls, the curly-headed children, the gay, happy laughter such a transformation seemed to him like a fairy tale, and it seemed incredible that such transitions were possible at the distance of some two miles in the course of one hour. And dreary thoughts prevented him from enjoying himself, and he kept thinking this was not life here, but bits of life fragments, that everything here was accidental, that one could draw no conclusions from it; and he even felt sorry for these girls, who were living and would end their lives in the wilds, in a province far away from the center of culture, where nothing is accidental, but everything is in accordance with reason and law, and where, for instance, every suicide is intelligible, so that one can explain why it has happened and what is its significance in the general scheme of things. He imagined that if the life surrounding him here in the wilds were not intelligible to him, and if he did not see it, it meant that it did not exist at all.
At supper the conversation turned on Lesnitsky
“He left a wife and child,” said Startchenko. “I would forbid neurasthenics and all people whose nervous system is out of order to marry; I would deprive them of the right and possibility of multiplying their kind. To bring into the world nervous, invalid children is a crime.”
“He was an unfortunate young man,” said Von Taunitz, sighing gently and shaking his head. “What a lot one must suffer and think about before one brings oneself to take one’s own life . . . a young life! Such a misfortune may happen in any family, and that is awful. It is hard to bear such a thing, insufferable. . . .”
And all the girls listened in silence with grave faces, looking at their father. Lyzhin felt that he, too, must say something, but he couldn’t think of anything, and merely said:
“Yes, suicide is an undesirable phenomenon.”
He slept in a warm room, in a soft bed covered with a quilt under which there were fine clean sheets, but for some reason did not feel comfortable: perhaps because the doctor and Von Taunitz were, for a long time, talking in the adjoining room, and overhead he heard, through the ceiling and in the stove, the wind roaring just as in the Zemstvo hut, and as plaintively howling: “Oo-oo-oo-oo!”
Von Taunitz’s wife had died two years before, and he was still unable to resign himself to his loss and, whatever he was talking about, always mentioned his wife; and there was no trace of a prosecutor left about him now.
“Is it possible that I may someday come to such a condition?” thought Lyzhin, as he fell asleep, still hearing through the wall his host’s subdued, as it were bereaved, voice.
The examining magistrate did not sleep soundly. He felt hot and uncomfortable, and it seemed to him in his sleep that he was not at Von Taunitz’s, and not in a soft clean bed, but still in the hay at the Zemstvo hut, hearing the subdued voices of the witnesses; he fancied that Lesnitsky was close by, not fifteen paces away. In his dreams he remembered how the insurance agent, black-haired and pale, wearing dusty high boots, had come into the bookkeeper’s office. “This is our insurance agent. . . .”
Then he dreamed that Lesnitsky and Loshadin the constable were walking through the open country in the snow, side by side, supporting each other; the snow was whirling about their heads, the wind was blowing on their backs, but they walked on, singing: We go on, and on, and on. . . .”
The old man was like a magician in an opera, and both of them were singing as though they were on the stage:
“We go on, and on, and on! . . . You are in the warmth, in the light and snugness, but we are walking in the frost and the storm, through the deep snow. . . . We know nothing of ease, we know nothing of joy. . . . We bear all the burden of this life, yours and ours. . . . Oo-oo-oo! We go on, and on, and on. . . .”
Lyzhin woke and sat up in bed. What a confused, bad dream! And why did he dream of the constable and the agent together? What nonsense! And now while Lyzhin’s heart was throbbing violently and he was sitting on his bed, holding his head in his hands, it seemed to him that there really was something in common between the lives of the insurance agent and the constable. Don’t they really go side by side holding each other up? Some tie unseen, but significant and essential, existed between them, and even between them and Von Taunitz and between all men; in this life, even in the remotest desert, nothing is accidental, everything is full of one common idea, everything has one soul, one aim, and to understand it it is not enough to think, it is not enough to reason, one must have also, it seems, the gift of insight into life, a gift which is evidently not bestowed on all. And the unhappy man who had broken down, who had killed himself the “neurasthenic,” as the doctor called him and the old peasant who spent every day of his life going from one man to another, were only accidental, were only fragments of life for one who thought of his own life as accidental, but were parts of one organism marvelous and rational for one who thought of his own life as part of that universal whole and understood it. So thought Lyzhin, and it was a thought that had long lain hidden in his soul, and only now it was unfolded broadly and clearly to his consciousness.
He lay down and began to drop asleep; and again they were going along together, singing: “We go on, and on, and on. . . . We take from life what is hardest and bitterest in it, and we leave you what is easy and joyful; and sitting at supper, you can coldly and sensibly discuss why we suffer and perish, and why we are not as sound and as satisfied as you.”
What they were singing had occurred to his mind before, but the thought was somewhere in the background behind his other thoughts and flickered timidly like a faraway light in foggy weather. And he felt that this suicide and the peasant’s sufferings lay upon his conscience, too; to resign himself to the fact that these people, submissive to their fate, should take up the burden of what was hardest and gloomiest in life how awful it was! To accept this, and to desire for himself a life full of light and movement among happy and contented people, and to be continually dreaming of such, means dreaming of fresh suicides of men crushed by toil and anxiety, or of men weak and outcast whom people only talk of sometimes at supper with annoyance or mockery, without going to their help. . . . And again:
“We go on, and on, and on . . .” as though someone were beating with a hammer on his temples.
He woke early in the morning with a headache, roused by a noise; in the next room Von Taunitz was saying loudly to the doctor:
“It’s impossible for you to go now. Look what’s going on outside. Don’t argue, you had better ask the coachman; he won’t take you in such weather for a million.”
“But it’s only two miles,” said the doctor in an imploring voice.
“Well, if it were only half a mile. If you can’t, then you can’t. Directly you drive out of the gates it is perfect hell, you would be off the road in a minute. Nothing will induce me to let you go, you can say what you like.”
“It’s bound to be quieter towards evening,” said the peasant who was heating the stove.
And in the next room the doctor began talking of the rigorous climate and its influence on the character of the Russian, of the long winters which, by preventing movement from place to place, hinder the intellectual development of the people; and Lyzhin listened with vexation to these observations and looked out of window at the snowdrifts which were piled on the fence. He gazed at the white dust which covered the whole visible expanse, at the trees which bowed their heads despairingly to right and then to left, listened to the howling and the banging, and thought gloomily:
“Well, what moral can be drawn from it? It’s a blizzard and that is all about it. . . .”
At midday they had lunch, then wandered aimlessly about the house; they went to the windows.
“And Lesnitsky is lying there,” thought Lyzhin, watching the whirling snow, which raced furiously round and round upon the drifts. “Lesnitsky is lying there, the witnesses are waiting. . . .”
They talked of the weather, saying that the snowstorm usually lasted two days and nights, rarely longer. At six o’clock they had dinner, then they played cards, sang, danced; at last they had supper. The day was over, they went to bed.
In the night, towards morning, it all subsided. When they got up and looked out of window, the bare willows with their weakly drooping branches were standing perfectly motionless; it was dull and still, as though nature now were ashamed of its orgy, of its mad nights, and the license it had given to its passions. The horses, harnessed tandem, had been waiting at the front door since five o’clock in the morning. When it was fully daylighted the doctor and the examining magistrate put on their fur coats and felt boots, and, saying good-bye to their host, went out.
At the steps beside the coachman stood the familiar figure of the constable, Ilya Loshadin, with an old leather bag across his shoulder and no cap on his head, covered with snow all over, and his face was red and wet with perspiration. The footman who had come out to help the gentlemen and cover their legs looked at him sternly and said:
“What are you standing here for, you old devil? Getaway!”
“Your honor, the people are anxious,” said Loshadin, smiling navely all over his face, and evidently pleased at seeing at last the people he had waited for so long. “The people are very uneasy, the children are crying. . . . They thought, your honor that you had gone back to the town again. Show us the heavenly mercy, our benefactors!”
The doctor and the examining magistrate said nothing, got into the sledge, and drove to Syrnya.
Written by Anton Chekhov
