Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2

by Leo Tolstoy

  XIX

  The bishop invited Father Misail to sit down and began telling him about the strange new developments in his diocese.

  ‘It is all the result of spiritual weakness and ignorance. Now you are a man of learning. I want you to go down there and call the people together and get the matter cleared up.’

  ‘With your grace’s blessing, I shall certainly try,’ said Father Misail. He was glad to have this commission. Any situation in which he could demonstrate the strength of his faith gave him satisfaction. And in converting others he always managed to persuade himself even more thoroughly that he himself really believed.

  ‘Please do your best, I am deeply troubled about my little flock,’ said the bishop, unhurriedly accepting in his pudgy white hands the glass of tea which a lay brother had brought him.

  ‘Why have you brought only one sort of jam? Go and get another,’ he said to the lay brother. ‘I really am deeply, deeply concerned about this matter,’ he continued, addressing Misail.

  Misail was glad of this opportunity to show his mettle. However, being a man of modest means he requested his travel expenses in advance, and since he feared that there might be some resistance from the uncouth peasantry, he requested that the governor of the province should be asked to send an instruction to the local police to give him every assistance, should the need arise.

  The bishop set up all the arrangements, and Misail, having with the help of the lay brother and the cook assembled the hamper and provisions so necessary for a journey to the back of beyond, set off for his appointed destination. As he started out on this official mission Misail was agreeably aware of the importance of the job he was engaged in, and also of the easing of any doubts he might have had concerning his own faith: he was, on the contrary, fully confident of its authenticity.

  His thoughts were centred not on the essence of his faith – this he took to be axiomatic – but on the refutation of these objections which were being made to its outward forms.

  XX

  The village priest and his wife received Father Misail with great respect, and the day after his arrival they called all the people together in the church. Misail, wearing a brand-new silk cassock and a pectoral cross, his hair well combed, advanced to the ambo;8 beside him stood the priest, a little further away the deacons and the choristers, and at the side-doors a few policemen had been stationed. The sectarians had also made their appearance, dressed in dirty, rough sheepskin coats.

  After the set prayers were over Father Misail delivered a sermon in which he exhorted those who had fallen away to return to the bosom of Holy Mother Church, threatening them with the pains of hell and promising full absolution to all who repented.

  The sectarians did not say anything, but when questioned they did reply.

  To the question, why they had fallen away from the Church, they replied that in the church people worshipped wooden gods made by human hands, whereas not only was this not laid down in Holy Scripture, but in the prophecies it said just the opposite. When Father Misail asked Chuyev whether it was true that they referred to the holy ikons as ‘boards’, Chuyev replied: ‘That’s right – just you take any ikon you like and turn it round, and you’ll see for yourself.’ When they were asked why they did not recognize the priesthood, they replied that in Scripture it was written ‘freely have ye received, freely give’, but priests would only dispense their grace in return for money. To all Misail’s attempts to support his position by reference to Holy Scripture, the tailor and Chuyev retorted calmly but firmly, referring to the same Scripture, of which they had a thorough grasp. Misail grew angry and threatened them with the secular authorities. To this the sectarians replied that Scripture said ‘If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you.’

  The encounter was inconclusive and the whole thing would have ended quietly, but the next day at mass Father Misail preached a sermon about the pernicious influence of those who distort the truth, and how they deserved all kinds of retribution; and some of the peasants as they came out of the church started talking about how it would be good to teach the godless ones a lesson so that they wouldn’t go on confusing the people. And that very day, while Father Misail was enjoying some appetizers of salmon and white fish with the rural dean and an inspector who had arrived from the local town, a disorder broke out in the village. The Orthodox folk had gathered together in a crowd in front of Chuyev’s hut and were waiting for those inside to come out so that they could give them a good hiding. There were about twenty of the sectarians in there, both men and women. Father Misail’s sermon, followed by this assemblage of the Orthodox and their threatening shouts had aroused in the sectarians a fierceness which had not been there before. Evening had come and it was time for the peasant women to milk the cows, but the Orthodox believers continued to stand there and wait, and when a young lad came out they started hitting him and drove him back into the house.

  The sectarians were discussing what they ought to do, but they were unable to agree among themselves.

  The tailor said that they should put up with whatever happened to them and not try to defend themselves. Chuyev, however, said that if they just put up with it they might all end up getting slaughtered, and he seized a poker and went out into the village street. The Orthodox believers hurled themselves upon him.

  ‘All right then, let it be according to the Law of Moses,’ he shouted, and he started hitting the Orthodox believers with the poker, putting out one man’s eye in the process. The rest of the sectarians slipped out of the hut and returned to their homes.

  Chuyev was put on trial for heresy and blasphemy, and sentenced to exile.

  Father Misail, however, received an award and was made an archimandrite.

  XXI

  Two years before these events took place, a healthy attractive young woman of oriental looks named Turchaninova had come from the Don Cossack territory to St Petersburg to study at the university. In Petersburg she met a student named Tyurin, the son of a zemstvo leader in the Simbirsk province, and fell in love with him, but her love for him was not of the usual womanly type, involving the desire to become his wife and the mother of his children, but a comradely love which drew its strength above all from a shared anger and detestation against the existing social order and the people who represented it, and from a consciousness of their own intellectual, educational and moral superiority to those people.

  She was a gifted student, well able to memorize the contents of lectures and to pass examinations without much effort, and in addition she devoured enormous quantities of the most recently published books. She was sure that her vocation lay not in bearing and bringing up children – in fact she regarded such a vocation with disgust and contempt – but in destroying the present order of things which fettered the fine potential of the common people, and in pointing out to men and women the new path of life revealed to her by the most recent European writers. Full in figure, pale of skin, rosy-cheeked and attractive, with dark flashing eyes and a thick plait of dark hair, she aroused in men feelings which she had no desire to arouse and could not possibly share, utterly absorbed as she was by her task of agitation and argument. But all the same she found it pleasant to arouse such feelings, and for that reason although she did not deliberately dress to show herself off, neither did she neglect her appearance. She enjoyed being attractive, and indeed it gave her the chance of showing how much she looked down on that which other women held to be so important. In her views on the possible means of struggle against the existing order she went further than most of her associates, her friend Tyurin among them, and took it as read that all methods in the struggle were valid and to be used, up to and including murder. Yet Katya Turchaninova the revolutionary was still at heart a kind and unselfish woman, forever spontaneously putting the interests, enjoyment and well-being of other people before her own, and always glad of the chance to do something to make someone else happy, whether it was a child, an old person, or an animal.

  Turchanino
va spent the summer vacation period in a district town in the Volga province staying with a friend of hers who was a village schoolmistress. Tyurin was living in the same district, in his father’s house. The three young people, and the local doctor too, met together frequently, lent each other books, argued, and fed one another’s shared sense of social indignation. The Tyurins’ property adjoined the Livyentsov estate where Pyotr Nikolayevich Sventitsky was now working as the steward. As soon as Pyotr Nikolayevich had arrived there and set about restoring order, young Tyurin, noting that the Livyentsovs’ peasants had a spirit of independence and a firm resolve to stand up for their rights, began to take an interest in them and often walked over to the village to talk to the peasants, explaining to them the principles of socialism in general and of the nationalization of the land in particular.

  When Pyotr Nikolayevich was murdered and the court case began, the trial gave the group of revolutionaries in the district town a powerful cause for agitation, and they denounced it outspokenly. Tyurin’s visits to the village and his conversations with the peasants were referred to in the court proceedings. Tyurin’s house was searched and some revolutionary pamphlets discovered, and he was arrested and taken away to Petersburg.

  Turchaninova travelled to Petersburg after him and went to the prison to try to see him, but they would not permit her to see him on just any day, but only on a public visiting-day, and even then she was only allowed to talk to Tyurin through a double iron grille. This visit strengthened her feelings of moral outrage still further. Her indignation finally reached its climax when she was faced with a young and handsome officer of the gendarmes who was obviously ready to grant her some concessions, provided she would agree to certain proposals of his. This incident drove her to the highest pitch of fury and hatred against all representatives of authority. She went to the chief of police in order to lodge a complaint. The chief of police echoed the words of the gendarme: that there was nothing they could do, and that the matter was under the jurisdiction of the Minister. She sent in a written memorandum to the Minister requesting an interview; it was refused. Then she decided that a desperate act was called for, and she bought a revolver.

  XXII

  The Minister was receiving visitors at his usual hour. After passing over three petitioners and talking for a while with a provincial governor, he went up to a pretty dark-eyed young woman in black who was standing there holding a piece of paper in her left hand. A lecherous glint appeared in the Minister’s eyes at the sight of this charming petitioner, but remembering his position the Minister adopted a serious expression.

  ‘And what can I do for you?’ he asked, advancing towards her.

  She made no reply, but swiftly drew out the revolver from beneath her cape, aimed it at the Minister’s chest and fired, but she missed.

  The Minister made a grab at her arm but she stepped back away from him and fired a second shot. The Minister fled. The young woman was immediately seized and held. She was shaking and unable to speak. Then suddenly she burst into hysterical laughter. The Minister had not even been wounded.

  The woman was Turchaninova. She was sent to a special detention prison pending the investigation of her case. Meanwhile the Minister, who had received congratulations and commiserations from persons in the very highest places and even from the Sovereign himself, appointed a commission to investigate the conspiracy which had led to this attempt on his life.

  There was of course no conspiracy whatever; but the officials of both the secret and civil police forces went assiduously to work to search out all the threads of the nonexistent conspiracy, conscientiously justifying their salaries and their expenditure. Rising early in the morning when it was still dark, they conducted search after search, transcribed papers and books, perused diaries and private letters, and wrote out extracts from them in beautiful handwriting on the finest paper. They questioned Turchaninova any number of times and set up confrontations with witnesses in their efforts to get her to reveal the names of her accomplices.

  The Minister was a kindly man at heart and felt very sorry for this healthy, attractive Cossack girl, but he told himself that he carried grave responsibilities to the state which he was bound to discharge, however painful this might prove to be. And when a former colleague of his, a court chamberlain who knew the Tyurin family, met him at a court ball and began to ask him about Tyurin and Turchaninova, the Minister shrugged his shoulders, crinkling the red sash he was wearing across his white waistcoat, and said:

  ‘Je ne demanderais pas mieux que de lâcher cette pauvre fillette, mais vous savez – le devoir.’9

  And meanwhile Turchaninova was sitting in her detention cell, exchanging occasional furtive tapped messages with her fellow-prisoners and reading the books she was given, but sometimes she would fall into a mood of fury and despair, beating on the walls with her fists, screaming and laughing.

  XXIII

  One day when Mariya Semyonovna had been to the local treasury office to draw her pension and was on her way home, she met a teacher whom she knew.

  ‘Good day, Mariya Semyonovna, have you been to collect your pay then?’ he called out to her from the opposite side of the road.

  ‘Yes, I have,’ replied Mariya Semyonovna. ‘It will do to plug a few gaps at least.’

  ‘Well, you should have plenty to plug the gaps and still have some left over,’ said the teacher, and he said goodbye to her and went on his way.

  ‘Goodbye,’ said Mariya Semyonovna, and as she was looking back at the teacher she walked straight into a tall man with extremely long arms and a stern face. As she came near to the house where she lived she was surprised to see this same long-armed man again. He watched her go into the house, stood there for a while, then turned and walked off.

  At first Mariya Semyonovna felt alarmed, then her alarm turned to a sort of melancholy. But by the time she had gone inside and distributed little gifts to her old father and her little scrofulous nephew Fedya, and petted the little dog Trezorka, who yelped with delight, she was feeling cheerful again, and handing over the money to her father she got on with the housework, to which there never seemed to be an end.

  The man she had bumped into was Stepan.

  After leaving the coaching inn where he had murdered the innkeeper Stepan had not gone back to the town. And strange to say, not only did the memory of the innkeeper’s murder not distress him, but he actually found himself returning to it in his mind several times each day. It gave him pleasure to think that he was capable of doing the deed so cleanly and skilfully that no one would ever find him out or prevent him from doing the same thing again, to other people. As he sat in a tavern drinking his tea and his vodka he kept scrutinizing the people around him with the same thought always in mind: how he could set about murdering them. To find himself a bed for the night he went to the house of a man who came from his own district, a drayman. The drayman was out. He said he would wait and sat down to chat with the man’s wife. Then, when she turned her back on him to tend the stove, it occurred to him that he could kill her. Surprised at himself, he shook his head, but then he took his knife from the top of his boot, threw her to the floor and cut her throat. The children started screaming, so he killed them too, and left the town at once that same day. Once out of the town he went into a village inn, where he stopped and had a good night’s sleep.

  The next day he walked back to the district town, and overheard Mariya Semyonovna’s conversation with the teacher while he was walking down the street. He was frightened by the way she had stared at him, nevertheless he decided to break into her house and take the money which she had drawn. When night came he broke the lock and went upstairs into a bedroom. The first person to hear him was the younger, married daughter. She cried out. Stepan immediately cut her throat. The son-in-law woke up and grappled with him. He got hold of Stepan by the throat and struggled with him for quite some time, but Stepan was too strong for him. Having finished off the son-in-law Stepan, now in a state of some agitation and ex
cited by the struggle, went behind a partition. On the other side of the partition Mariya Semyonovna was lying in bed. She raised herself on the bed and looked at Stepan with gentle, frightened eyes and crossed herself. Once again her look frightened Stepan. He lowered his gaze.

  ‘Where’s the money?’ he asked without looking up.

  She did not answer.

  ‘Where’s the money?’ said Stepan, showing her the knife.

  ‘What are you doing? You can’t do this,’ she said.

  ‘Oh yes I can, and I will.’

  Stepan moved nearer, intending to seize her arms so that she could not stop him doing what he intended to do, but she did not raise her hands, did not resist, but simply pressed her hands to her bosom, sighed heavily and repeated:

  ‘Oh, what a great sin. What are you doing? Have pity on yourself. You think you are destroying others, but it’s your own soul you are destroying. Oh, oh!’ she screamed.

  Stepan could not stand her voice or the look on her face any longer, and he slashed the knife right across her throat. – ‘I haven’t got time to waste chatting with you.’ – She slumped back on to the pillows and began to wheeze, soaking one of the pillows with her blood. He turned away and walked through the bedrooms, collecting things as he went. When he had gathered up everything he wanted Stepan lit a cigarette, sat down for a moment, brushed down his clothes and then went out. He had thought he would get away with this murder just as easily as he had done with the previous ones, but even before he had reached the place where he planned to stay the night he suddenly felt so weary that he could hardly move a limb. He lay down in a ditch and stayed there for the rest of that night, the whole of the next day and the night that followed.

  Part Two

  I

  As he lay there in the ditch Stepan kept seeing before him Mariya Semyonovna’s thin, meek, terrified face and hearing her voice: ‘You can’t do this,’ her peculiar lisping, pathetic voice kept on repeating. And Stepan kept reliving over again everything he had done to her. He began to feel really frightened, and he shut his eyes, swaying his shaggy head from side to side in an attempt to shake these thoughts and memories out of it. And for a moment he managed to free himself from his memories, but in their place appeared first one black devil, then another, and after them still other black devils with red eyes, all pulling hideous faces and all saying the same thing: ‘You did away with her – now do away with yourself, or we won’t give you any peace.’ And he would open his eyes and once again see her and hear her voice, and he was filled with pity for her, and with fear and loathing towards himself. And he would shut his eyes again, and again the black devils would be there.