CHAPTER III
Yevsey's life passed smoothly and evenly.
He wanted to please his master, even realized this would be of advantage to him, and he felt he would succeed, though he behaved with watchful circumspection and no warmth in his heart for the old man. The fear of people engendered in him a desire to suit them, a readiness for all kinds of services, in order to defend himself against the possibility of attack. The constant expectation of danger developed a keen power of observation, which still more deepened his mistrust.
He observed the strange life in the house without understanding it. From basement to roof people lived close packed, and every day, from morning until night, they crawled about in the tenement like crabs in a basket. Here they worked more than in the village, and, it seemed, were imbued with even keener bitterness. They lived restlessly, noisily, and hurriedly, as if to get through all the work as soon as possible in preparation of a holiday, which they wanted to meet as free people, washed, clean, peaceful, and tranquilly joyous. The heart of the boy sank within him, and the question constantly recurred:
"Will it pass away?"
But the holiday never came. The people spurred one another on, wrangled, and sometimes fought. Scarcely a day passed on which they did not speak ill of one another.
In the mornings the master went down to the shop, while Yevsey remained in the apartment to put it in order. This accomplished, he washed himself, went to the tavern for boiling water, and then returned to the shop, where he drank the morning tea with his master. While breakfasting the old man almost invariably asked him:
"Well, what now?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing is little."
Once, however, Yevsey had a different answer.
"To-day the watchmaker told the furrier's cook that you received stolen articles."
Yevsey said this unexpectedly to himself, and was instantly seized with a tremble of fear. He bowed his head. The old man laughed quietly, and said in a drawling voice without sincerity:
"The scoundrel!" His dark, dry lips quivered. "Thank you for telling me. Thank you! You see how the people don't love me."
From that time Yevsey began to pay close attention to the conversation of the tenants, and promptly repeated everything he heard to his master, speaking in a quiet, calm voice and looking straight into his face. Several days later, while putting his master's room into order, he found a crumpled paper ruble on the floor, and when at tea the old man asked him, "Well, what now?" Yevsey replied, "Here I have found a ruble."
"You found a ruble, did you? I found a gold piece," said the master laughing.
Another time Yevsey picked up a twenty-kopek piece in the entrance to the shop, which he also gave to the master. The old man slid his glasses to the end of his nose, and rubbing the coin with his fingers looked into the boy's face for a few seconds without speaking.
"According to the law," he said thoughtfully, "a third of what you find, six kopeks, belongs to you." He was silent, sighed, and stuck the coin into his vest pocket. "But anyway you're a stupid boy." Yevsey did not get the six kopeks.
Quiet, unnoticed, and when noticed, obliging, Yevsey Klimkov scarcely ever drew the attention of the people to himself, though he stubbornly followed them with the broad, empty gaze of his owl-like eyes, with the look that did not abide in the memory of those who met it.
From the first days the reticent quiet Rayisa Petrovna interested him strongly. Every evening she put on a dark, rustling dress and a black hat, and sallied forth. In the morning when he put the rooms in order she was still asleep. He saw her only in the evening before supper, and that not every day. Her life seemed mysterious to him, and her entire taciturn being, her white face and stationary eyes, roused in him vague suggestions of something peculiar. He persuaded himself that she lived better and knew more than everybody else. A kindly feeling which he did not understand sprang up in his heart for this woman. Every day she appeared to him more and more beautiful.
Once he awoke at daybreak, and walked into the kitchen for a drink. Suddenly he heard someone entering the door of the vestibule. He rushed to his room in fright, lay down, and covered himself with the blanket, trying to press himself to the chest as closely as possible. In a few minutes he stuck out his ear, and in the kitchen heard heavy steps, the rustle of a dress, and the voice of Rayisa Petrovna.
"Oh, oh, you – " she was saying.
Yevsey rose, walked to the door on tiptoe, and looked into the kitchen. The quiet woman was sitting at the window taking off her hat. Her face seemed whiter than ever, and tears streamed from her eyes. Her large body swayed, her hands moved slowly.
"I know you!" she said, shaking her head. She rose to her feet, supporting herself on the window-sill.
The bed in the master's room creaked. Yevsey quickly jumped back on his chest, lay down, and wrapped himself up.
"They've done something bad to her," he thought, full of keen pity. At the same time, however, he was inwardly glad of her tears. They brought this woman, who lived a secret nocturnal existence, nearer to him.
The next moment someone seemed to be passing by him with sly steps. He raised his head, and suddenly jumped from the chest, as if burned by the thin angry shout:
"Ugh! Go away!"
Then there was some hissing. The master in his nightgown hastily came out of the kitchen, stopped, and said to Yevsey in a whistling voice:
"Sleep! Sleep! What's the matter? Sleep!"
The next morning in the shop the old man asked him:
"Were you frightened last night?"
"Yes."
"She was in her cups. It happens to her sometimes."
Though the question trembled on his lips, Yevsey did not dare to ask what her occupation was. Some minutes later the old man asked:
"Do you like her?"
"I do."
"Well," said the master sternly, "even if you do, you ought to know that she's an extremely shrewd woman. She is silent, but bad. She's a sinner. Yes, that's what she is. Do you know what she does? She's a musician. She plays the piano." The old man accurately described a piano, and added didactically, "A person who plays the piano is called a pianist. And do you know what a house of ill fame is?"
From the talk of the furriers and glaziers in the yard Yevsey already knew something about disreputable resorts; but desiring to learn more he answered:
"I don't know."
The old man gave him a lengthy explanation in words very intelligible to Yevsey. He spoke with heat, occasionally spitting and wrinkling up his face to express his disgust of the abomination. Yevsey regarded the old man with his watery eyes, and for some reason did not believe in his aversion.
"So you see, every evening she plays in a house like that, and depraved women dance with drunken men to the accompaniment of her music. The men are all crooks, some of them, maybe, even murderers." Raspopov sighed in exhaustion, and wiped his perspiring face. "Don't trust her. You understand? I tell you, she's a cunning woman, and she's mean."
The boy believed everything the master told him about the piano and the house of ill fame, but failed to be impressed by a single word regarding the woman. In fact, everything the old man said of her merely increased the cautious, ever-watchful feeling of mistrust with which Yevsey treated his master, and by coloring Rayisa Petrovna with a still deeper tinge of the unusual, made her seem even more beautiful in his eyes.
Another object of Yevsey's curiosity besides Rayisa was Anatol, apprentice to the glazier, Kuzin, a thin, flat-nosed boy with ragged hair, dirty, always jolly, and always steeped in the odor of oil. He had a high ringing voice, which Yevsey liked very much to hear when he shouted:
"Wi-i-ndow pa-anes."
He spoke to Yevsey first. Yevsey was sweeping the stairway when he suddenly heard from below the loud question:
"Say there, kid, what government are you from?"
"From this government," answered Yevsey.
"I am from the government of Kostrom. How old are you?"
"Thirteen."
"I am, too. Come along with me."
"Where to?"
"To the river to go in bathing."
"I have to stay in the shop."
"To-day is Sunday."
"That doesn't make any difference."
"Well, go to the devil."
The glazier boy disappeared. Yevsey was not offended by his oath.
Anatol was off the whole day carrying a box of glass about the city, and usually returned home just as the shop was being closed. Then almost the entire evening his indefatigable voice, his laughter, whistling, and singing would rise from the yard. Everybody scolded him, yet all loved to meddle with him and laugh at his pranks. Yevsey was surprised at the boldness with which the ragged, snub-nosed boy behaved toward the grown-up folk, and he experienced a sense of envy when he saw the gold-embroidery girl run about the yard in chase of the jolly, insolent fellow. He was powerfully drawn to the glazier boy, for whom he found a place in his vague fancies of a clean and quiet life.
Once, after supper, Yevsey asked the master:
"May I go down in the yard?"
The old man consented reluctantly.
"Go, but don't stay long. Be sure not to stay long."
Another time when Yevsey put the same request the master added:
"No good will come of your being in the yard."
Yevsey ran down the stairway quickly, and seated himself in the shade to observe Anatol. The yard was small and hemmed in on all sides by the high houses. The tenants, workingmen and women, and servants, sat resting on the rubbish heaps against the walls. In the center of the ring Anatol was giving a performance.
"The furrier Zvorykin going to church!" he shouted.
To his astonishment Yevsey saw the little stout furrier with hanging lower lip and eyes painfully screwed up. Thrusting out his abdomen and leaning his head to one side, Anatol struggled toward the gate in short steps, reluctance depicted in his walk. The people sitting around laughed and shouted approval.
"Zvorykin returning from the saloon!"
Now Anatol swayed through the yard, his feet dragging along feebly, his arms hanging limp, a dull look in his wide-open eyes, his mouth gaping hideously yet comically. He stopped, tapped himself on the chest, and said in a wheezy pitiful voice:
"God – how satisfied I am with everything and everybody! Lord, how good and pleasant everything is to Thy servant, Yakov Ivanich. But the glazier Kuzin is a blackguard – a scamp before God, a jackass before all the people – that's true, God – "
The audience roared, but Yevsey did not laugh. He was oppressed by a twofold feeling of astonishment and envy. The desire to see this boy frightened and wronged mingled with the expectation of new pranks. He felt vexed and unpleasant because the glazier boy did not show up men who inflicted hurt, but merely funny men. Yevsey sat there with mouth agape and a stupid expression on his face, his owlish eyes staring.
"Here goes glazier Kuzin!"
Before Yevsey appeared the gaunt red muzhik always half drunk, the sleeves of his dirty shirt tucked up, his right hand thrust in the breast of his apron, his left hand deliberately stroking his beard – Kuzin had a reddish forked beard. He was frowning and surly and moved slowly, like a heavy cart-load. Looking sidewise he screeched in a cracked, hoarse voice:
"You are carrying on again, you heretic? Am I to listen to this nonsense for long? You blasted, confounded – "
"Skinflint Raspopov!" announced Anatol.
The smooth, sharp little figure of Yevsey's master crept past him moving his feet noiselessly. He worked his nose as if smelling something, nodded his head quickly, and kept tugging at the tuft on his chin with his little hand. In this characterization something loathsome, pitiful, and laughable became quite apparent to Yevsey, whose vexation rose. He felt sure his master was not such as the young glazier represented him to be.
Next, Anatol took to mimicking members of the audience. Inexhaustible, stimulated by the applause, he tinkled until late at night like a little bell, evoking kindly, cheerful laughter. Sometimes the man who was touched would rush to catch him, and a noisy chase about the yard would ensue.
Yevsey sighed. Anatol noticed him, and pulled him by the hand into the middle of the yard, where he introduced him to the audience.
"Here he is – sugar and soap. Skinflint Raspopov's cousin morel."
Turning the boy's little figure in all directions, he poured forth a flowing stream of strange comic words about his master, about Rayisa Petrovna, and about Yevsey himself.
"Let me go!" Yevsey quietly demanded, trying to tear his hand from Anatol's strong grip, in the meantime listening attentively in the endeavor to understand the hints, the filth of which he felt. Whenever Yevsey struggled hard to tear himself away, the audience, usually the women, said lazily to Anatol:
"Let him go."
For some reason their intercession was disagreeable to Yevsey. It exasperated Anatol, too, who began to push and pinch his victim and challenge him to a fight. Some of the men urged the boys on.
"Well – fight! See which will do the other up."
The women objected:
"A fight! Thanks, we're not interested. Don't."
Yevsey again felt something unpleasant in these words.
Finally Anatol scornfully pushed Yevsey aside.
"Oh, you kid!"
The next morning Yevsey met Anatol outside the house carrying his box of glass, and suddenly, without desiring to do it, he said to him:
"Why do you make fun of me?"
The glazier boy looked at him.
"What of it?"
Yevsey was unable to reply.
"Do you want to fight?" asked Anatol again. "Come to our shed. I will wait for you until evening."
He spoke calmly and in a business-like way.
"No, I don't want to fight," replied Yevsey quietly.
"Then you needn't! I'd lick you anyway," said the glazier, and added with assurance, "I certainly would."
Yevsey sighed. He could not understand this boy, but he longed to understand him. So he asked a second time:
"I say, why do you make fun of me?"
Anatol apparently felt awkward. He winked his lively eyes, smiled, and suddenly shouted in anger:
"Go to the devil! What are you bothering me about? I'll give it to you so – "
Yevsey quickly ran into the shop, and for a whole day felt the itching of an undeserved insult. This did not put an end to his inclination for Anatol, but it forced him to leave the yard whenever Anatol noticed him, and he dismissed the glazier boy from the sphere of his dreams.
CHAPTER IV
Soon after this unsuccessful attempt to draw near to a human being Yevsey was one evening awakened by talking in his master's room. He listened and thought he distinguished Rayisa's voice. Desiring to convince himself of her presence there he rose and quietly slipped over to the tightly closed door, and put his eyes to the keyhole.
His sleepy glance first perceived the light of the candle, which blinded him. Then he saw the large rotund body of the woman on the black sofa. She lay face upward entirely naked. Her hair was spread over her breast, and her long fingers slowly weaved it into a braid. The light quivered on her fair body. Clean and bright, it seemed like a light cloud which rocked and breathed. It was very beautiful. She was saying something. Yevsey could not catch the words, but heard only the singing, tired, plaintive voice. The master was sitting in his nightgown upon a chair by the sofa, and was pouring wine into a glass with a trembling hand. The tuft of grey hair on his chin also trembled. He had removed his glasses, and his face was loathsome.
"Yes, yes, yes! Hm! What a woman you are!"
Yevsey moved away from the door, lay down on his bed, and thought:
"They have gotten married."
He pitied Rayisa Petrovna for having become the wife of a man who spoke ill of her, and he pitied her because it must have been very cold for her to lie naked on the leather sofa. An evil thought flashed through his mind, which confirmed the words of the old man about her, but Yevsey anxiously drove it away.
The evening of the next day Rayisa Petrovna brought in supper as always, and said in her usual voice:
"I am going."
The master, too, spoke to her in his usual voice, dry and careless.
Several days passed by. The relation between the master and Rayisa did not change, and Yevsey began to think he had seen the naked woman in a dream. He was very reluctant to believe his master's words about her.
Once his Uncle Piotr appeared unexpectedly and, so it seemed to Yevsey, needlessly. He had grown grey, wrinkled, and shorter.
"I am getting blind, Orphan," he said sipping tea from a saucer noisily and smiling with his wet eyes. "I cannot work anymore, so I will have to go begging. Yashka is unmanageable. He wants to go to the city, and if I don't let him, he will run away. That's the kind of a chap he is."
Everything the blacksmith said was wearisome and difficult to listen to. He seemed to have grown duller. He looked guilty, and Yevsey felt awkward and ashamed for him in the presence of his master. When he got ready to go, Yevsey quietly thrust three rubles into his hand, and saw him out with pleasure.
Though Yevsey endeavored as before to please his master in every way, he became afraid to agree with him. The bookshop after a time aroused a dim suspicion by its resemblance to a tomb tightly packed with dead books. They were all loose, chewed up, and sucked out, and emanated a mouldy, putrid odor. Few were sold; which did not surprise Yevsey. What stirred his curiosity was the attitude of the master to the purchasers and the books.
The old man would take a book in his hand, carefully turn over its musty pages, stroke the covers with his dark fingers, smile quietly, and nod his head. He seemed to fondle the book as though it were alive, to play with it as with a kitten or a puppy. While reading a book he carried on with it a quiet, querulous conversation, like Uncle Piotr with the furnace-fire. His lips moved in good-humored derision, his head kept nodding, and now and then he mumbled and laughed.
"So, so – yes – hmm – see – what's that? Ha, ha! Ah, the impudence – I understand, I understand – it'll never come about – no-o-o – ha, ha!"
These strange exclamations coming from the old man as if he were disputing with somebody both astonished and frightened Yevsey, and pointed to the secret duplicity in his master's life.
"You don't read books," said the master to him once. "That's good. Books are always lechery, the child of a prostituted mind. They deal with everything, they excite the imagination, and create useless agitation and disturbance. Formerly we used to have good historical books, stories of quiet people about the past. But now every book wants to inspire you with hostility to life and to lay bare man, who ought always to be covered up both in the flesh and in the spirit in order to defend him from the devil, from curiosity, and from the imagination, which destroys faith. It's only in old age that books do no harm to a man, when he is guarded against their violence by his experience."
Though Yevsey did not understand these talks he remembered them well, and though they met with no response in him, they confirmed his sense of mystery – the mystery that invested all human life, as it were, in a hostile envelope.
When he sold a book, the old man regarded it with regret, and fairly smelled the purchaser, with whom he talked in an extremely loud and rapid voice. Sometimes, however, he lowered his voice to a whisper, when his dark glasses would fix themselves upon the face of the customer. Often on seeing to the door a student who had bought a book, he followed him with a smile, and nodded his head queerly. Once he shook his finger at the back of a man who had just left, a short, handsome fellow with fine black tendrils on a pale face. The largest number of customers were students and people having a certain resemblance to them. Sometimes old men came. These rummaged long among the books, and haggled sharply over the prices.
An almost daily visitor was a man who wore a chimney-pot and on his right hand a large gold ring set with a stone. He had a broad pimply nose on a stout flat shaven face. When Dorimedont Lukin played chess with the master, he snuffled loud and tugged at his ear with his left hand. He often brought books and paper parcels, over which the master nodded his head approvingly and smiled quietly. He would then hide them in the table, or in a corner on a shelf in back of him. Yevsey did not see his master pay for these books, but he did see him sell them.
One of the students began to visit the shop more frequently than the others. He was a tall, blue-eyed young man with a carrot-colored mustache and a cap stuck back on his neck, leaving bare a large white forehead. He spoke in a thick voice, laughed aloud, and always bought many old journals.
Once the master pointed out a book to him that Dorimedont had brought; and while the student glanced through it, the old man told him something in a quick whisper.
"Interesting!" exclaimed the student, smiling amiably. "Ah, you old sinner, aren't you afraid, eh?"
The master sighed and answered:
"If you absolutely feel it's the truth, you ought to help it along in whatever little ways you can."
They whispered a long time. Finally the student said aloud:
"Well, then, agreed! Remember my address."
The old man took the address down on a piece of paper, and when Dorimedont came and asked, "Well, what's new, Matvey Matveyevich?" the master handed him the address, and said with a smile:
"There's the new thing."
"S-so – Nikodim Arkhangelsky," read Dorimedont. "That's business. We'll look up this Nikodim."
Sometime after, upon sitting down to play chess, he announced to the master:
"That Nikodim turned out to be a fish with plenty of roe. We found something of pretty nearly everything in his place."
"Return the books to me," said the master.
"Certainly," and Dorimedont snuffled.
The blue-eyed student never appeared again. The short young man with the black mustache also vanished after the master had given Dorimedont his address. All this was strange. It fed the boy's suspicions, and indicated some mystery and enigma.
Once, when the master was absent from the shop, Yevsey, while dusting the shelves, saw the books brought by Dorimedont. They were small, soiled, and ragged. He carefully and quickly put them back in the same order, scenting something dangerous in them. Books in general did not arouse his interest. He tried to read, but never succeeded in concentrating his mind, which, already burdened by a mass of observation, dwelt upon minutiæ. His thoughts drifted apart, and finally disappeared evaporating like a thin stream of water upon a stone on a hot day. When he worked and stirred about he was altogether incapable of thinking; the motion, as it were, tore the cobweb of his ideas. The boy did his work slowly and accurately, like an automaton, without putting anything of himself into it, and scarcely understanding its meaning.
When he was free and sat motionless he was carried away by a pleasant sensation of flight in a transparent mist, which enveloped the whole of life and softened everything, changing the boisterous reality into a quiet, sweetly sounding half-slumber.
When Yevsey was in this mood the days passed rapidly, in a flight not to be stayed. His external life was monotonous. Thought-stirring events happened rarely, and his brain insensibly became clogged with the dust of the work-day. He seldom went about in the city, for he did not like it. The ceaseless motion tired his eyes, the noise filled his head with heavy, dulling confusion. The endless city at first seemed like a monster in a fairy-tale, displaying a hundred greedy mouths, bellowing with hundreds of insatiable throats. But when Yevsey regarded the varied tumult of the street life he saw in it merely painful and wearisome monotony.
In the morning when he tidied his master's room, Yevsey put his head out of the window for several minutes, and looked down to the bottom of the deep, narrow street. Everywhere he saw the same people, and already knew what each of them would be doing in an hour or the next day. The cabmen drove in the same indolent fashion, and sat on the box each like the other; the shop boys, all of whom he knew, were unpleasant. Their insolence was a source of danger. Every man seemed chained to his business like a dog to his kennel. Occasionally something new flashed by, or whispered to him, but it was difficult for him to see and understand it in the thick mass of all that was familiar, ordinary, and unpleasant.
Even the churches in the city did not please him. They were not cosy, nor bright, but close and penetrated by extremely powerful odors of incense, oil, and sweat. Yevsey could not bear strong smells. They made his head turn, and filled him with confused anxious desires.
Sometimes on a holiday the master closed the shop, and took Yevsey through the city. They walked long and slowly. The old man pointed out the houses of the rich and eminent people, and told of their lives. His recitals were replete with accounts of women who ran away from their husbands, of dead people, and of funerals. He talked about them in a dry solemn voice, criticizing and condemning everything. He grew animated only when telling how and from what this or that man died. In his opinion, apparently, matters of disease and death were the most edifying and interesting of earthly subjects.
At the end of every walk he treated Yevsey to tea in a tavern, where musical machines played. Here everybody knew the old man, and behaved toward him with timid respect. Yevsey grown tired, his brain dizzied by the cloud of heavy odors, would fall into drowsy silence under the rattle and din of the music.
Once, however, the master took him to a house which contained numerous articles of gold and silver, marvellous weapons, and garments of silk brocade. Suddenly the mother's forgotten tales began to beat in the boy's breast, and a winged hope trembled in his heart. He walked silently through the rooms for a long time, disconcertedly blinking his eyes, which burned greedily.
When they returned home he asked the master:
"Whose are they?"
"They are public property – the Czar's," the old man explained impressively.
The boy put more questions.
"Who wore such coats and sabres?"
"Czars, boyars, and various imperial persons."
"There are no such people to-day?"
"How so? Of course there are. It would be impossible to be without them. Only now they dress differently."
"Why differently?"
"More cheaply. Formerly Russia was richer. But now it has been robbed by various foreign people, Jews, Poles, and Germans."
Raspopov talked for a long time about how nobody loved Russia, how all robbed it, and wished it every kind of harm. When he spoke much Yevsey ceased to believe him or understand him. Nevertheless he asked:
"Am I an imperial person, too?"
"In a sense. In our country all are imperial people, all are subjects of the Czar. The whole earth is God's, and the whole of Russia is the Czar's."
Before Yevsey's eyes handsome, stately personages in glittering garb circled in a bright, many-colored round dance. They belonged to another fabulous life, which remained with him after he had lain down to sleep. He saw himself in this life clad in a sky-blue robe embroidered with gold, with red boots of Morocco leather on his feet. Rayisa was there, too, in brocade and adorned with precious gems.
"So it will pass away," he thought.
To-day this thought gave rise not to hope in a different future but to quiet regret for the past.
On the other side of the door he heard the dry even voice of his master:
"Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain – "