Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  Another question presented itself to me more than once. Why did he run away, that is, literally run away on foot, rather than simply drive away? I put it down at first to the impracticability of fifty years and the fantastic bent of his mind under the influence of strong emotion. I imagined that the thought of posting tickets and horses (even if they had bells) would have seemed too simple and prosaic to him; a pilgrimage, on the other hand, even under an umbrella, was ever so much more picturesque and in character with love and resentment. But now that everything is over, I am inclined to think that it all came about in a much simpler way. To begin with, he was afraid to hire horses because Varvara Petrovna might have heard of it and prevented him from going by force; which she certainly would have done, and he certainly would have given in, and then farewell to the great idea for ever. Besides, to take tickets for anywhere he must have known at least where he was going. But to think about that was the greatest agony to him at that moment; he was utterly unable to fix upon a place. For if he had to fix on any particular town his enterprise would at once have seemed in his own eyes absurd and impossible; he felt that very strongly. What should he do in that particular town rather than in any other? Look out for ce marchand? But what marchand? At that point his second and most terrible question cropped up. In reality there was nothing he dreaded more than ce marchand, whom he had rushed off to seek so recklessly, though, of course, he was terribly afraid of finding him. No, better simply the high road, better simply to set off for it, and walk along it and to think of nothing so long as he could put off thinking. The high road is something very very long, of which one cannot see the end — like human life, like human dreams. There is an idea in the open road, but what sort of idea is there in travelling with posting tickets? Posting tickets mean an end to ideas. Vive la grande route and then as God wills.

  After the sudden and unexpected interview with Liza which I have described, he rushed on, more lost in forgetfulness than ever. The high road passed half a mile from Skvoreshniki and, strange to say, he was not at first aware that he was on it. Logical reasoning or even distinct consciousness was unbearable to him at this moment. A fine rain kept drizzling, ceasing, and drizzling again; but he did not even notice the rain. He did not even notice either how he threw his bag over his shoulder, nor how much more comfortably he walked with it so. He must have walked like that for nearly a mile or so when he suddenly stood still and looked round. The old road, black, marked with wheel-ruts and planted with willows on each side, ran before him like an endless thread; on the right hand were bare plains from which the harvest had long ago been carried; on the left there were bushes and in the distance beyond them a copse.

  And far, far away a scarcely perceptible line of the railway, running aslant, and on it the smoke of a train, but no sound was heard. Stepan Trofimovitch felt a little timid, but only for a moment. He heaved a vague sigh, put down his bag beside a willow, and sat down to rest. As he moved to sit down he was conscious of being chilly and wrapped himself in his rug; noticing at the same time that it was raining, he put up his umbrella. He sat like that for some time, moving his lips from time to time and firmly grasping the umbrella handle. Images of all sorts passed in feverish procession before him, rapidly succeeding one another in his mind.

  “Lise, Lise,” he thought, “and with her ce Maurice. . . . Strange people. . . . But what was the strange fire, and what were they talking about, and who were murdered? I fancy Nastasya has not found out yet and is still waiting for me with my coffee . . . cards? Did I really lose men at cards? H’m! Among us in Russia in the times of serfdom, so called. . . . My God, yes — Fedka!”

  He started all over with terror and looked about him. “What if that Fedka is in hiding somewhere behind the bushes? They say he has a regular band of robbers here on the high road. Oh, mercy, I ... I’ll tell him the whole truth then, that I was to blame . . . and that I’ve been miserable about him for ten years. More miserable than he was as a soldier, and . . . I’ll give him my purse. H’m! J’ai en tout quarante roubles; il prendra les roubles et il me tuera tout de meme.”

  In his panic he for some reason shut up the umbrella and laid it down beside him. A cart came into sight on the high road in the distance coming from the town.

  “Grace a Dieu, that’s a cart and it’s coming at a walking pace; that can’t be dangerous. The wretched little horses here ... I always said that breed ... It was Pyotr Ilyitch though, he talked at the club about horse-breeding and I trumped him, et puis . . . but what’s that behind? . . . I believe there’s a woman in the cart. A peasant and a woman, cela commence d etre rassurant. The woman behind and the man in front — c’est tres rassurant. There’s a cow behind the cart tied by the horns, c’est rassurant au plus haut degre.”

  The cart reached him; it was a fairly solid peasant cart. The woman was sitting on a tightly stuffed sack and the man on the front of the cart with his legs hanging over towards Stepan Trofimovitch. A red cow was, in fact, shambling behind, tied by the horns to the cart. The man and the woman gazed open-eyed at Stepan Trofimovitch, and Stepan Trofimovitch gazed back at them with equal wonder, but after he had let them pass twenty paces, he got up hurriedly all of a sudden and walked after them. In the proximity of the cart it was natural that he should feel safer, but when he had overtaken it he became oblivious of everything again and sank back into his disconnected thoughts and fancies. He stepped along with no suspicion, of course, that for the two peasants he was at that instant the most mysterious and interesting object that one could meet on the high road.

  “What sort may you be, pray, if it’s not uncivil to ask?” the woman could not resist asking at last when Stepan Trofimovitch glanced absent-mindedly at her. She was a woman of about seven and twenty, sturdily built, with black eyebrows, rosy cheeks, and a friendly smile on her red lips, between which gleamed white even teeth.

  “You . . . you are addressing me?” muttered Stepan Trofimovitch with mournful wonder.

  “A merchant, for sure,” the peasant observed confidently. He was a well-grown man of forty with a broad and intelligent face, framed in a reddish beard.

  “No, I am not exactly a merchant, I ... I ... moi c’est autre chose.” Stepan Trofimovitch parried the question somehow, and to be on the safe side he dropped back a little from the cart, so that he was walking on a level with the cow.

  “Must be a gentleman,” the man decided, hearing words not Russian, and he gave a tug at the horse.

  “That’s what set us wondering. You are out for a walk seemingly?” the woman asked inquisitively again.

  “You . . . you ask me?”

  “Foreigners come from other parts sometimes by the train; your boots don’t seem to be from hereabouts. . . .”

  “They are army boots,” the man put in complacently and significantly.

  “No, I am not precisely in the army, I ...”

  “What an inquisitive woman!” Stepan Trofimovitch mused with vexation. “And how they stare at me . . . mais enfin. In fact, it’s strange that I feel, as it were, conscience-stricken before them, and yet I’ve done them no harm.”

  The woman was whispering to the man.

  “If it’s no offence, we’d give you a lift if so be it’s agreeable.”

  Stepan Trofimovitch suddenly roused himself.

  “Yes, yes, my friends, I accept it with pleasure, for I’m very tired; but how am I to get in?”

  “How wonderful it is,” he thought to himself, “that I’ve been walking so long beside that cow and it never entered my head to ask them for a lift. This ‘real life’ has something very original about it.”

  But the peasant had not, however, pulled up the horse.

  “But where are you bound for?” he asked with some mistrustfulness.

  Stepan Trofimovitch did not understand him at once.

  “To Hatovo, I suppose?”

  “Hatov? No, not to Hatov’s exactly? . . . And I don’t know him though I’ve heard of him.”

  “The vill
age of Hatovo, the village, seven miles from here.”

  “A village? C’est charmant, to be sure I’ve heard of it. . . .”

  Stepan Trofimovitch was still walking, they had not yet taken him into the cart. A guess that was a stroke of genius flashed through his mind.

  “You think perhaps that I am . . . I’ve got a passport and I am a professor, that is, if you like, a teacher . . . but a head teacher. I am a head teacher. Oui, c’est comme ca qu’on pent traduire. I should be very glad of a lift and I’ll buy you . . . I’ll buy you a quart of vodka for it.”

  “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.”

  “Woul
d 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.