Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2

by Leo Tolstoy

  Ivan Mironov went and saw Sventitsky on the pretext of looking for work, but in reality he was there to see how things were and find out all he could. Having done that, and discovered that there was no night-watchman and that the horses were kept in separate loose-boxes in the stable, he called in the horse-thieves and saw the whole business through.

  After splitting the proceeds with the muzhiks from Podolsk Ivan Mironov returned to his village with five roubles. At home there was no work for him to do: he had no horse. And from that time on Ivan Mironov took to associating with horse-thieves and gypsies.

  XI

  Pyotr Nikolayevich Sventitsky did everything in his power to find the horse-thieves. He knew that the raid could not have been carried out without the help of one of his employees. And so he began to regard his farm-hands with suspicion and to enquire which of the farm-workers had not been sleeping at the farm on the night in question. He was told that Proshka Nikolayev had not spent that night at the farm. Proshka was a young fellow who had just returned from doing his military service, a good-looking, nimble fellow whom Pyotr Nikolayevich used to take with him on outings to serve as a coachman. The district superintendent of police was a friend of Pyotr Nikolayevich’s, and he was also acquainted with the chief constable, the marshal of the nobility, the leader of the zemstvo and the investigating magistrate. All these persons regularly came to his name-day celebrations and were familiar with his delicious fruit liqueurs and his pickled mushrooms – white mushrooms, honey agarics and milk agarics. They all sympathized with him and attempted to offer him their help.

  ‘There you are, and you are the one who is always defending the muzhiks,’ said the district superintendent. ‘I was telling the truth when I told you they were worse than wild animals. You can’t do a thing with them unless you use the knout and the rod. So you say it was this Proshka, the one who rides out with you as coachman, do you?’

  ‘Yes, he’s the one.’

  ‘Have him brought in here, please.’

  Proshka was summoned and they began to question him.

  ‘Where were you that night?’

  Proshka tossed his hair back and flashed them a glance.

  ‘At home.’

  ‘What do you mean, “at home”? All the farm-hands say you were not there.’

  ‘As you please, sir.’

  ‘We’re not talking about what I please. So where were you?’

  ‘At home.’

  ‘Very well, then. Constable, take this man to the district station.’

  ‘As you please, sir.’

  So Proshka still refused to say where he had been on the night of the raid, but the reason for his obstinacy was that he had spent the night with his girlfriend Parasha and he had promised not to give her away, so he did not do so. But there was no evidence. Proshka was released again. However, Pyotr Nikolayevich was sure that the raid had been wholly the work of this Prokofy Nikolayev, and from that time on he began to hate him. One day when Pyotr Nikolayevich had taken him out with him as coachman, he sent him off to the posting station to fetch the horses some fodder. Proshka, as was his custom, bought two measures of oats at a coaching inn. He fed one-and-a-half measures to the horses and exchanged the remaining half-measure for vodka. Pyotr Nikolayevich found out about this and informed the local justice of the peace. The justice of the peace sentenced Proshka to three months in gaol. Prokofy was a man with a good opinion of himself. He considered himself superior to others and was proud of it. Being in prison was a humiliating experience for him. He could no longer give himself airs among his fellow men, and he fell at once into a gloomy state of mind.

  Proshka returned home from gaol embittered, not so much against Pyotr Nikolayevich, as against the world in general. As everyone said, after his time in prison Prokofy lost heart, and he took to drinking, was soon caught stealing clothes from a tradesman’s wife, and again landed up in gaol.

  Meanwhile all that Pyotr Nikolayevich could discover about the horses was that someone had come across the hide of a chestnut gelding, and Pyotr Nikolayevich identified it as Beauty’s. And the impunity of these thieves came to exasperate Pyotr Nikolayevich more and more. Now he could not set eyes on muzhiks or even talk about them without being filled with anger, and whenever he had the chance he came down on them as hard as possible.

  XII

  Although, once he had passed on the coupon, Yevgeny Mikhailovich had stopped thinking about it, his wife Mariya Vasilyevna was unable to forgive either herself for having been duped, or her husband for the cruel things he had said to her, or – and this was the main thing – those two young villains for having taken her in so cleverly.

  From the day of the deception onwards she began to look very closely at any grammar-school boys she encountered. Once she actually met Makhin but did not recognize him because he saw her first and contorted his features so effectively that it completely altered his face. But when two weeks later she came face to face with Mitya Smokovnikov on the pavement, she recognized him at once. She let him go by, then turned on her heel and walked after him. On reaching the flat where he lived she made enquiries and found out whose son he was, and the next day she went to the grammar school, where in the entrance hall she met Mikhail Vvedensky, the scripture teacher. He enquired what he could do for her. She replied that she wanted to see the headmaster.

  ‘Unfortunately the headmaster is not here – he is unwell; but perhaps I can help you, or take a message for him.’

  Mariya Vasilyevna decided to tell the scripture teacher everything.

  Father Vvedensky was a widower, a graduate from the theological academy, and a man of considerable self-esteem. The previous year he had come across Smokovnikov senior at a society meeting in the course of a discussion about religious belief, in which Smokovnikov had soundly trounced him on all points and exposed him to ridicule. As a result Vvedensky had resolved to keep a watchful eye on the son, and having detected in him the same indifference to the Divine Law that his unbelieving father had displayed, he began to persecute him, and even failed him in an examination.

  Having found out from Mariya Vasilyevna about young Smokovnikov’s escapade, Vvedensky could not help feeling a certain satisfaction, seeing in this incident a confirmation of his own prejudices concerning those immoral people who lacked the guidance of the Church, and he decided to make use of the incident in order, as he tried to assure himself, to reveal the dangers threatening all those who abandoned the Church and her ways – but in the depths of his soul he simply wanted to get his own back on a proud and self-confident atheist.

  ‘Yes, it is very sad, very sad,’ said Father Vvedensky, stroking the smooth edges of his pectoral cross. ‘I am so glad you have entrusted this matter to me: as a servant of the Church I shall naturally try to make sure that the young man is not left without moral guidance, but I shall also do my best to make his edification as gentle as possible.’

  ‘Yes, I shall act in a way which befits my calling,’ said Father Vvedensky to himself, thinking that he had now quite forgotten the father’s hostility towards him and that he desired nothing but the moral good and salvation of the boy.

  Next day during the scripture lesson Father Mikhail told his pupils all about the episode of the forged coupon and informed them that it was a grammar-school pupil who had been responsible for it.

  ‘It was a vile, shameful act,’ he said, ‘but concealing it is even worse. If it was one of you who did this – which I cannot believe – then it would be better for him to own up to it than to hide his guilt.’

  As he said this he was staring straight at Mitya Smokovnikov. Mitya went red and started to sweat, then he burst into tears and ran from the classroom.

  When Mitya’s mother heard about these events she persuaded her son to tell her the whole truth and then hurried off to the photographic supply shop. She paid back the twelve roubles fifty to the proprietor’s wife and induced her to keep quiet about the schoolboy’s name. She then instructed her son to deny everythin
g, and on no account to make any confession to his father.

  And indeed, when Fyodor Mikhailovich heard what had happened at the grammar school, and when his son on being questioned denied it all, he went to see the headmaster and explained the whole matter to him, saying that the scripture teacher’s conduct had been deeply reprehensible and that he did not intend to let things rest there. The headmaster called in the scripture teacher and a heated exchange took place between him and Fyodor Mikhailovich.

  ‘A stupid woman attempted to pin something on my son and then retracted her accusation, and you could find nothing better to do than to slander the honour of a thoroughly upright boy.’

  ‘I did not slander him, and I will not permit you to speak to me in such a tone. You are forgetting my vocation.’

  ‘I don’t give a fig for your vocation.’

  ‘Your deluded opinions, sir,’ said the scripture teacher, his chin quivering so that his scanty little beard trembled in sympathy, ‘your deluded opinions are well known to the whole town.’

  ‘Gentlemen, Father,’ said the headmaster, attempting to pacify the two disputants. But to pacify them was impossible.

  ‘My holy vocation makes it my duty to concern myself with the moral and religious upbringing of the young.’

  ‘Enough of this pretence. Do you think I don’t know that you haven’t a grain of genuine religious faith in you?’

  ‘I consider it beneath me to continue talking to such a gentleman as you,’ declared Father Mikhail, who had been particularly offended by Smokovnikov’s last remark, since he knew that it was accurate. He had gone through the whole course at the theological academy and consequently had long since ceased to believe in what he professed and what he preached; in fact he believed only that everyone ought to make themselves believe those things which he had made himself believe.

  Smokovnikov was not so much infuriated by the scripture teacher’s behaviour, as by discovering this striking example of the clerical influence which was beginning to manifest itself throughout our society, and he told everyone about the incident.

  Father Vvedensky on the other hand, seeing in it a demonstration of the nihilism and atheism which had taken hold not only of the younger generation but of the older one as well, became more and more convinced of the necessity of combating them. The more he condemned the unbelief of Smokovnikov and his kind, the more convinced he became of the firm and unshakable character of his own faith, and the less need he felt to test his faith or to reconcile it with his actual way of living. His faith, acknowledged by the world around him, was for him his principal weapon in his fight against those who denied it.

  These thoughts, called forth by his clash with Smokovnikov, together with the disagreeable events at the grammar school which followed in its wake – namely, a reprimand and a caution from the school authorities – impelled him to take a decision which had been tantalizing him for a long time, since the death of his wife, in fact: to take monastic vows and thus opt for a career already followed by several of his fellow-students at the academy, one of whom was already a member of the hierarchy, another the superior of a monastery, and expected soon to be made a bishop.

  Towards the end of the academic year Vvedensky left the grammar school, took his monastic vows and the new name of Misail, and was very soon given the rectorship of a seminary in a town on the Volga.

  XIII

  Meanwhile Vasily the yardman had set out on the highroad to the south.

  By day he walked, and at night the local policeman would show him to the usual quarters provided for wanderers. Wherever he went people gave him bread, and sometimes even asked him in to have supper with them. In one village in the Oryol province where he was spending the night he was told that a merchant who had leased an orchard from the landowner was looking for fit young fellows as night-watchmen. Vasily was tired of living as a beggar but he did not want to go back to his village, so he went to see the merchant with the orchard and got himself taken on as a night-watchman at a wage of five roubles per month.

  Vasily found life in his watchman’s hut very pleasant, particularly when the sweet apples had begun to ripen and the other watchmen brought in huge trusses of fresh straw gathered from under the threshing-machine in the master’s shed. He would lie the whole day long on the fresh, fragrant straw beside the still more fragrant piles of spring and winter windfall apples, just keeping an eye open to make sure the children were not pilfering the apples still on the trees, and whistling and singing songs. Singing songs Vasily was really good at. He had a fine voice. The women and girls would come up from the village to get some apples. Vasily would laugh and joke with them a bit and gave more or less apples in exchange for eggs or a few copecks to whichever of them took his fancy – and then lie down again, only getting up to have his breakfast or his dinner or his supper.

  Vasily possessed only one shirt, a pink cotton one full of holes, and he had nothing to put on his feet, but his body was strong and healthy, and when the porridge pot was taken off the fire Vasily would eat enough for three, so that the old man who was the chief watchman was always amazed at him. Vasily did not sleep at night and would whistle or call out to keep himself awake, and he could see a long way in the dark, like a cat. One night some big boys from the village climbed into the trees to shake the apples down. Vasily crept up and went for them; they did their best to beat him off but he sent them all flying, and took one of them back to the hut and handed him over to the master.

  Vasily’s first hut was at the far end of the orchard, but the second, where he lived for the sweet apple harvest, was only forty yards from the master’s house. And in this hut Vasily enjoyed himself even more. All day long Vasily could see the gentlemen and the young ladies playing games, going out for drives or walks, and in the evenings and at night playing the piano or the violin, singing or dancing. He would see the students and the young ladies sitting in the windows snuggling up to one another, and then some of them would go for walks in the dark avenues of lime trees, where the moonlight only came through in streaks and patches. He would see the servants hurrying about with food and drink, he would see how the cooks, the laundresses, the stewards, the gardeners, the coachmen – all of them worked just to keep the masters supplied with food and drink and amusement. Sometimes the young gentlefolk would drop in to see him in his hut, and he would choose the finest apples, the ripe and rosy ones, to give to them, and the young ladies would bite into them there and then with a crunching noise, and praise the apples and say something – Vasily knew it was about him – in French, and get him to sing for them.

  Vasily greatly admired this way of life, remembering the kind of life he had led in Moscow, and the thought that the beginning and the end of everything was to have money came more and more often into his head.

  And Vasily began to think more and more about what he could do to get hold of some more money right away. He started to recall how he had made the odd profit before and he decided that that wasn’t the way to go about it, just helping yourself to whatever was lying about; he needed to work out things in advance, to see what was what, and do a clean job leaving no evidence behind. Towards Christmas time they picked the last of the winter apples. The boss had made a good profit and he paid off all the watchmen, including Vasily, and thanked them.

  Vasily put on the coat and the hat the young master had given him, but he did not go home, for the thought of that brutish, peasant life filled him with disgust – instead he went back to the town with the hard-drinking ex-conscripts who had worked alongside him as watchmen. Once back in the town he decided to break into and burgle the shop owned by his former employer who had beaten him and thrown him out without his wages. He knew the layout of the place and where the money was kept. He got one of the ex-soldiers to stand guard outside, and he himself smashed a window opening on to the yard, climbed in and took all the money. The thing was carried out skilfully, and no traces were found. Vasily got away with three hundred and seventy roubles. He gave a h
undred to his assistant and went off with the rest to another town, where he went on a binge with his comrades and girlfriends.

  XIV

  Meanwhile Ivan Mironov had become an accomplished, daring and successful horse-thief. His wife Afimya, who used to nag him on account of what she called his ‘botched schemes’, was now well pleased with her husband and even quite proud of him, for he was the owner of a sheepskin coat with a hood, and she had a shawl and a new fur coat.

  Everyone in the village and surrounding district knew that there was never a horse-theft in which he was not somehow involved, but they were afraid to give evidence against him, and even when some suspicion did fall on him he invariably emerged without a stain on his character. His most recent theft had been from the night-grazing ground at Kolotovka. As far as possible Ivan Mironov liked to choose who to steal from, and he got particular satisfaction when his victims were landowners and merchants. But stealing from landowners and merchants was more difficult. And so when landowners’ and merchants’ horses were not accessible he would steal peasants’ horses instead. Thus he stole from the night-grazing at Kolotovka as many horses as he could get hold of. This job, however, was carried out not by him, but by a skilful young fellow called Gerasim whom he had persuaded to do it. The muzhiks did not discover that their horses were gone until daybreak, and then they rushed off along all possible roads to look for them. The horses were in fact already hidden in a ravine in the middle of the state forest. Ivan Mironov planned to keep them there until the following night, then to make off with them to a yardman he knew in a place forty versts away. Ivan Mironov visited Gerasim in the forest and brought him some pie and vodka, returning home by a forest path on which he hoped not to meet anybody. Unfortunately for him he came up against a forest guard.