Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2

by Leo Tolstoy

  Natalya Ivanovna suddenly went red, and actually began to perspire because of what she was thinking.

  ‘But would it be impossible to pardon them now?’

  ‘How can they be pardoned when they have been sentenced by the court? Only the Tsar can grant pardons.’

  ‘But how would the Tsar ever find out about them?’

  ‘They have the right to appeal for mercy.’

  ‘But it’s on my account that they’re being executed,’ said Natalya Ivanovna, who was not very intelligent. ‘And I forgive them.’

  The district superintendent burst out laughing.

  ‘Well then, why don’t you lodge an appeal?’

  ‘Can I do that?’

  ‘Certainly you can.’

  ‘But won’t it be too late to get it to him now?’

  ‘You could send it by telegram.’

  ‘To the Tsar?’

  ‘Of course, you can send a telegram even to the Tsar.’

  The discovery that the executioner had refused to do his duty and was ready to suffer rather than kill anybody brought about a sudden upheaval in Natalya Ivanovna’s soul, and the feeling of sympathy and horror which had come close to breaking out on several occasions, now burst its way into the open and took possession of her.

  ‘Filipp Vasilyevich my dear, please write the telegram for me. I want to ask the Tsar to show mercy to them.’

  The district superintendent shook his head. ‘What if we were to get into trouble over this?’

  ‘But I’ll be the one responsible. I won’t say anything about you at all.’

  ‘What a kind woman she is,’ thought the district superintendent, ‘a good-hearted woman. If only my wife was like that, it would be heaven – quite different from the way things are.’

  And so the district superintendent composed a telegram to the Tsar: ‘To His Imperial Majesty the Sovereign Emperor. Your Imperial Majesty’s loyal subject, widow of the Collegiate Assessor Pyotr Nikolayevich Sventitsky who was murdered by peasants, prostrating herself at Your Imperial Majesty’s sacred feet’ (the district superintendent was particularly pleased with this bit of the telegram he had composed) ‘begs You to have mercy on the men condemned to death, the peasants so-and-so and so-and-so, of such-and-such a province, region, district and village.’

  The district superintendent sent off the telegram in person, and Natalya Ivanovna’s soul was filled with joy and happiness. It seemed to her that if she, the widow of the murdered man, was ready to forgive and to ask for mercy, then the Tsar could not fail to show mercy too.

  XII

  Liza Yeropkina was living on a plateau of continuous exaltation. The further she travelled along the Christian way of life which had been revealed to her, the more certain was she that this way was the true one, and the more jubilant did her soul become.

  Now she had two immediate objectives in view. The first was to convert Makhin, or rather, as she expressed it to herself, to return him to his true self, to his own good and beautiful nature. She loved him, and by the light of her love she was able to perceive the divine element in his soul, common to all human beings, yet she saw in this fundamental element of life shared by all men and women a goodness, a tenderness and a distinction which were his alone. Her other objective was to cease to be rich. She had wanted to get free of her property in order to put Makhin to the test, but beyond that she desired to do this for her own sake, for the sake of her soul – and she wanted to do it according to the principles of the Gospel. She started the process by planning to give away her land, but she was thwarted in putting this idea into practice first by her father, and then even more so by the flood of suppliants who applied to her in person or in writing. Then she decided to turn to an elder, a man well known for the holiness of his life, and to ask him to take her money and to use it in whatever way he thought fitting. On hearing of this her father was very angry, and in a furious exchange he called her a madwoman and a psychopath, and announced his intention of taking steps to protect her from herself, as a person of unsound mind.

  Her father’s irritable, exasperated tone of voice affected her powerfully and she lost control of herself, bursting into angry tears and calling him a despot, and even a monster of selfishness.

  She asked her father’s forgiveness and he said that he was not angry with her, but she could see that he was hurt and that inwardly he had not really forgiven her. She was unwilling to talk to Makhin about any of this. Her sister was jealous of her attachment to Makhin and had become quite estranged from her. Thus Liza had no one to share her feelings with, no one she could confide in.

  ‘God is the one I should be confiding in,’ she told herself, and as it was now Lent she decided that she would observe the Lenten fast and make her confession, telling her confessor everything and asking his advice about what she should do next.

  Not far from the city there was a monastery where the elder lived who had become famous for his way of life, his teaching, his prophecies, and the healings which were attributed to him.

  The elder had received a letter from Yeropkin senior, warning him of his daughter’s visit and of her abnormal, hysterical state and expressing his confidence that the elder would put her back on the right path – the path of the golden mean and the good Christian life lived in harmony with the existing order of things.

  Tired out from his regular session of receiving visitors, the elder nonetheless agreed to see Liza and gently counselled her to behave with moderation and to submit to the existing circumstances of her life, and to her parents. Liza said nothing, merely blushed and perspired, but when he had finished she began to speak meekly, with tears in her eyes, about the words of Christ who had said ‘Leave thy father and thy mother, and follow me’; then, becoming more and more animated, she began to explain to him her whole conception of what Christianity really meant. At first the elder smiled slightly and brought out some conventional points of teaching, but then he fell silent and began to sigh, repeating to himself ‘O Lord, O Lord’.

  ‘Very well then, come to me tomorrow and make your confession,’ he said, blessing her with his wrinkled hand.

  The next day he heard her confession, and without continuing their conversation of the previous day, sent her away, having briefly refused to take upon himself the disposal of her property.

  This young woman’s purity, her utter devotion to the will of God, her fervour, impressed the elder deeply. He had long wanted to renounce the world, but the monastery needed his activities, which were a source of income for the community. And he had accepted this, although he was vaguely aware of the falsity of his position. People were turning him into a saint, a miracle-worker, but in reality he was a weak man carried along by the current of his own success. And the soul of this young woman which had just been opened to him had revealed to him the truth about his own soul. And he had seen just how far he was from what he wanted to be and from the goal towards which his heart was drawing him.

  Soon after Liza’s visit he withdrew to his cell, and it was only after three weeks had gone by that he emerged again into the church to conduct a service; and after the service he preached a sermon in which he reproached himself and denounced the wickedness of the world and called it to repentance.

  He took to delivering a sermon every two weeks. And more and more people came to hear these sermons. And his fame as a preacher spread further and further. There was something special, bold and sincere in his sermons. And this was why he had such a powerful effect upon other people.

  XIII

  Meanwhile Vasily had been carrying out his plans as he had intended. One night he and some companions got into the house of a rich man named Krasnopuzov. He knew that Krasnopuzov was a miser and a man of depraved character, and he broke into his writing-desk and stole thirty thousand roubles in cash. And Vasily did with it as he pleased. He actually stopped drinking, and gave money to poor girls so that they could get married. He financed weddings, paid off people’s debts, and lay low himself. His o
nly concern was how best to distribute the money. He even gave some to the police. And they stopped looking for him.

  His heart rejoiced. And when eventually despite everything he was arrested, he laughed and boasted at his trial, saying that when it was in paunchy old Krasnopuzov’s possession the money had never done any good, in fact the owner didn’t know how much he’d got, ‘Whereas I put the stuff into circulation and helped good folk with it’.

  And his defence was so cheerful and good-hearted that the jury almost acquitted him. He was sentenced to be exiled.

  He thanked the court and gave advance warning that he intended to escape.

  XIV

  The telegram which Sventitsky’s widow sent to the Tsar produced no effect whatever. The committee which dealt with petitions decided initially that they would not even report it to the Tsar, but then one day when the Tsar was at luncheon and the conversation turned to the Sventitsky case, the chairman of the petitions committee who was at table with the sovereign informed him about the telegram they had received from the wife of the murdered man.

  ‘C’est très gentil de sa part,’11 remarked one of the ladies of the Imperial family.

  The Tsar merely sighed, shrugged his shoulders beneath their epaulettes and said ‘The law is the law.’ And he held up his glass, into which a chamber-footman poured some sparkling Moselle. Everyone tried to look as though they were impressed by the wisdom of the sovereign’s remark. And nothing further was said about the telegram. And the two peasants – the old man and the young man – were hanged with the assistance of a Tatar executioner, a cruel and bestial murderer who had been summoned from Kazan especially for the purpose.

  The old man’s wife wanted to dress her husband’s body in a white shirt, white foot-cloths and new shoes, but she was not allowed to do so and both men were buried in a single grave outside the fence of the cemetery.

  *

  ‘Princess Sofya Vladimirovna was telling me that he is a most wonderful preacher,’ said the Tsar’s mother, the Dowager Empress one day to her son. ‘Faites-le venir. Il peut prěcher à la cathédrale.’12

  ‘No, it would be better to have him preach to us here,’ said the Tsar, and he gave orders that the elder Isidor should be invited to come to the court.

  All the generals and highest officials were assembled in the court chapel. A new and unusual preacher was something of an event.

  A small grey-haired, thin old man came out and cast his eye over them all. ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,’ he said, and began his sermon.

  To begin with all was well, but the further it went, the worse it became. ‘Il devenait de plus en plus aggressif,’13 as the Empress put it immediately afterwards. He fulminated against everyone and everything. He referred to the death penalty. He said that the need for the death penalty was a symptom of bad government. Could it really be permissible, in a Christian country, to kill people?

  They all looked at one another, all of them concerned exclusively about the impropriety of the sermon and about how disagreeable it was for the sovereign, but no one said anything out loud. When Isidor had said ‘Amen’ the Metropolitan went up to him and asked him to come and have a word with him in private.

  After his talk with the Metropolitan and the Chief Procurator of the Synod the old man was sent straight back to a monastery – not to his own monastery, but to the one at Suzdal, where the Father Superior and commandant of the prison was Father Misail.

  XV

  They all pretended that there had been nothing disagreeable about Father Isidor’s sermon, and no one made any mention of it. Even the Tsar felt that the elder’s words had left no impression in his mind, nevertheless on two occasions later that day his thoughts turned to the execution of the two peasants and to the telegram sent by Sventitsky’s widow appealing for their pardon. That afternoon there was a parade, followed by a drive to an outdoor fěte, then a reception for ministers, then dinner, and in the evening the theatre. As usual the Tsar fell asleep the moment his head touched the pillow. That night he was wakened by a terrible dream: in a field stood a gallows with corpses dangling from it, and the corpses were sticking out their tongues, and the tongues protruded further and further. And someone was shouting ‘This is your doing, this is your doing.’ The Tsar woke up sweating and started to think. For the first time ever he started to think about the responsibility which lay upon him, and all the things the little old man had said came back to him …

  But he could see the human being within himself only as if from a great distance, and he was unable to yield to the simple demands of the human being within him because of all the other demands coming at him from all sides as Tsar; and to acknowledge the demands of the human being within as taking precedence over those of the Tsar – that was beyond his strength.

  XVI

  After serving his second term in prison Prokofy [Proshka], that lively, proud, dandified young fellow, had come out an utterly broken man. When he was sober he simply sat about doing nothing, and however much his father shouted and swore at him, he went on living an idle life consuming the family’s bread, and furthermore whenever he got the chance he would steal things and take them off to the tavern to get drunk on the proceeds. He lounged about, coughing, hawking and spitting. The doctor whom he went to consult listened to Prokofy’s chest and shook his head.

  ‘What you need, my lad, is what you haven’t got.’

  ‘I know that, it’s what I’ve always needed.’

  ‘You need to drink plenty of milk, and you mustn’t smoke.’

  ‘But it’s Lent now, and anyway we don’t have a cow.’

  One night that spring he could not get to sleep the whole night, he felt rotten and he was longing for a drink. There was nothing in the house for him to get his hands on and sell. He put on his fur hat and went out. He walked down the street until he came to where the clergy lived. Outside the deacon’s house there was a harrow standing propped up against the wattle fence. Prokofy went over, slung the harrow up on to his back and walked off with it to Petrovna at the inn. ‘Maybe she’ll give me just a little bottle of vodka for it.’ He had not gone far before the deacon came out on to the porch of his house. It was now fully light, and he could see Prokofy making off with his harrow.

  ‘Hey, what are you up to?’

  The deacon’s servants came out, seized Prokofy and threw him in the lock-up. The Justice of the Peace sentenced him to eleven months in prison.

  Autumn came round. Prokofy was now transferred to the prison hospital. He was coughing all the time, fit to tear his lungs out. And he could not get warm. Those other patients must have been in better shape than he was, because they were not shivering. Prokofy, though, kept on shivering day and night. The warden was trying to economize on firewood and did not heat the prison hospital until November each year. Prokofy suffered physical agonies, but what he suffered spiritually was worse than anything. Everything seemed to him disgusting and he hated everybody: the deacon, the warden who refused to heat the hospital, the orderly, and the patient next to him who had a red, swollen lip. He also conceived a deep hatred for the new convict who was brought in to join them. This convict was Stepan. He had developed a severe inflammation of the head and had been transferred to the hospital and placed in a bed alongside Prokofy. To begin with Prokofy detested him, but later he became so fond of Stepan that his main aim in life was to have a chance of talking to him. It was only after talking to him that the pain in Prokofy’s heart was ever eased.

  Stepan was constantly telling the other patients about the most recent murder he had committed and about the effect it had had on him.

  ‘She didn’t scream or anything like that,’ he would tell them, ‘she just said “Here you are, cut my throat. It’s not me you should feel sorry for, it’s yourself.’ ”

  ‘Yes, I know that well enough, it’s a terrible thing to do a person in. I once cut a sheep’s throat, and I didn’t feel too good about it myself. And here am I
that’s never killed anybody, but they’ve gone and done for me, the swine. I’ve never killed anybody …’

  ‘Well and good, that’ll be counted in your favour.’

  ‘And where will that be then?’

  ‘What do you mean, where? What about God then?’

  ‘God? You don’t see much of him about, do you? I don’t believe all that stuff, friend. The way I see it is, you just die and the grass grows over you. And that’s all about it.’

  ‘How can you think that? I’ve done in that many, but she, she was kind-hearted, never did anything but help people. All right then, do you think it will be the same for me as it’ll be for her? No, just you wait and see …’

  ‘So you think that when you die, your soul goes on?’

  ‘That’s it. I reckon that’s the truth.’

  Dying was a hard process for Prokofy as he lay there gasping for breath. But when his last hour came he suddenly felt easier. He called Stepan over to him.

  ‘Well, brother, goodbye. I can see it’s time for me to die now. I was really scared, but it’s all right now. I’d just like it to be quick.’

  And Prokofy died in the prison hospital.

  XVII

  Meanwhile Yevgeny Mikhailovich’s business affairs were going from bad to worse. His shop was mortgaged. Trade refused to pick up. Another shop had opened in the town and the interest on his mortage was due. He had to take out another loan to pay the interest. And in the end he was obliged to put up the shop and all the contents for sale. Yevgeny Mikhailovich and his wife rushed hither and thither but nowhere could they find the four hundred roubles they needed in order to save their business.

  They had faint hopes of the merchant Krasnopuzov, whose mistress was friendly with Yevgeny Mikhailovich’s wife. But now it was all over town that an enormous sum of money had been stolen from Krasnopuzov. People said that it amounted to half a million.

  ‘And who do you think stole it?’ Yevgeny Mikhailovich’s wife was saying. ‘Vasily, the one who used to be our yardman. They say he’s throwing the money about all over the place, and the police have been bribed to take no notice.’