Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 1

by Leo Tolstoy

  And so it happened to Polikéy. Polikéy had married and God had given him good luck. His wife, the herdsman’s daughter, turned out to be a healthy, intelligent, hard-working woman, who bore him one fine baby after another. And though Polikéy still stuck to his trade all went well till one fine day his luck forsook him and he was caught. And it was all about a trifle: he had hidden away some leather reins of a peasant’s. They were found, he was beaten, the mistress was told of it, and he was watched. He was caught a second and a third time. People began to taunt him, the steward threatened to have him conscripted, the mistress gave him a scolding, and his wife wept and was broken-hearted. Everything went wrong. He was a good-natured man; not bad, but only weak. He was fond of drink and so in the habit of it that he could not leave it alone. Sometimes his wife would scold him and even beat him when he came home drunk, and he would weep, saying: ‘Unfortunate man that I am, what shall I do? Blast my eyes, I’ll give it up! Never again!’ A month would go by, he would leave home, get drunk, and not be seen for a couple of days. And his neighbours would say: ‘He must get the money somewhere to go on the spree with!’ His latest trouble had been with the office clock. There was an old wall-clock there that had not been in working order for a long time. He happened to go in at the open door by himself and the clock tempted him. He took it and got rid of it in the town. As ill luck would have it the shopman to whom he sold the clock was related to one of the house-serfs, and coming to see her one holiday he spoke about the clock. People began making inquiries – especially the steward, who disliked Polikéy —just as if it was anybody else’s concern! It was all found out and reported to the mistress, and she sent for Polikéy. He fell at her feet at once and pathetically confessed everything, just as his wife had told him to do. He carried out her instructions very well. The mistress began admonishing him; she talked and talked and maundered on about God and virtue and the future life and about wife and children, and at last moved him to tears. Then she said:

  ‘I forgive you; only you must promise me never to do it again!’

  ‘Never in all my life. May I go to perdition! May my bowels gush out!’ said Polikéy, and wept touchingly.

  Polikéy went home and for the rest of the day lay on the stove blubbering like a calf. Since then nothing more had been traced to him. But his life was no longer pleasant; he was looked on as a thief, and when the time of the conscription drew near everybody hinted at him.

  As already mentioned, Polikéy was a horse-doctor. How he had suddenly become one nobody knew, himself least of all. At the stud-farm, when he worked under the head-keeper who got exiled, his only duties were to clean out the dung from the stables, sometimes to groom the horses, and to carry water. He could not have learned it there. Then he became a weaver: after that he worked in a garden, weeding the paths; then he was condemned to break bricks for some offence; then he took a place as yard-porter with a merchant, paying a yearly sum to his mistress for leave to do so. So evidently he could not have had any experience as a veterinary there either; yet somehow during his last stay at home his reputation as a wonderfully and even a rather supernaturally clever horse-doctor began gradually to spread. He bled a horse once or twice, then threw it down and prodded about in its thigh, and then demanded that it should be placed in a trave, where he began cutting its frog till it bled, though the horse struggled and even whined, and he said this meant ‘letting off the sub-hoof blood’! Then he explained to a peasant that it was absolutely necessary to let the blood from both veins, ‘for greater ease’, and began to strike the dull lancet with a mallet; then he bandaged the innkeeper’s horse under its belly with a selvedge torn from his wife’s shawl, and finally he began to sprinkle all sorts of sores with vitriol, to drench them with something out of a bottle, and sometimes to give internally whatever came into his head. And the more horses he tormented and did to death, the more he was believed in and the more of them were brought to him.

  I feel that for us educated people it is hardly the thing to laugh at Polikéy. The methods he employed to inspire confidence are the same that influenced our fathers, that influence us, and will influence our children. The peasant lying prone on the head of his only mare (which not only constitutes his whole wealth but is almost one of his family) and gazing with faith and horror at Polikéy’s frowning look of importance and thin arms with upturned sleeves, as, with the healing rag or a bottle of vitriol between his teeth, he presses upon the very spot that is sore and boldly cuts into the living flesh (with the secret thought, ‘The bow-legged brute will be sure to get over it!’), at the same time pretending to know where is blood and where pus, which is a tendon and which a vein – that peasant cannot conceive that Polikéy could lift his hand to cut without knowing where to do it. He himself could not do so. And once the thing is done he will not reproach himself with having given permission to cut unnecessarily. I don’t know how you feel about it, but I have gone through the same experience with a doctor who, at my request, was tormenting those dear to me. The lancet, the whitish bottle of sublimate, and the words, ‘the staggers – glanders – to let blood, or matter’, and so on, do they not come to the same thing as ‘neurosis, rheumatism, organisms’, and so forth? Wage du zu irren und zu träumen3 refers not so much to poets as to doctors and veterinary surgeons.

  III

  ON the evening when the village meeting, in the cold darkness of an October night, was choosing the recruits and vociferating in front of the office, Polikéy sat on the edge of his bed pounding some horse medicine on the table with a bottle – but what it was he himself did not know. He had there corrosive sublimate, sulphur, Glauber’s salts, and some kind of herb which he had gathered, having suddenly imagined it to be good for broken wind and then considered it not amiss for other disorders. The children were already lying down – two on the stove, two on the bed, and one in the cradle beside which Akulína sat spinning. The candle-end – one of the proprietress’s candles which had not been put away carefully enough – was burning in a wooden candlestick on the window-sill and Akulína every now and then got up to snuff it with her fingers, so that her husband should not have to break off his important occupation. There were some free-thinkers who regarded Polikéy as a worthless veterinary and a worthless man. Others, the majority, considered him a worthless man but a great master of his art; but Akulína, though she often scolded and even beat her husband, thought him undoubtedly the first of horse-doctors and the best of men. Polikéy sprinkled some kind of simple on the palm of his hand (he never used scales, and spoke ironically of the Germans who use them: ‘This,’ he used to say, ‘is not an apothecary’s!’). Polikéy weighed the simple on his hand and tossed it up, but there did not seem enough of it and he poured in ten times more. ‘I’ll put in the lot,’ he said to himself. ‘It will pick ’em up better.’ Akulína quickly turned round at the sound of her lord and master’s voice, expecting some command; but seeing that the business did not concern her she shrugged her shoulders. ‘What knowledge! … Where does he get it?’ she thought, and went on spinning. The paper which had held the simple fell to the floor. Akulína did not overlook this.

  ‘Annie,’ she cried, ‘look! Father has dropped something. Pick it up!’

  Annie put out her thin little bare legs from under the cloak with which she was covered, slid down under the table like a kitten, and got the paper.

  ‘Here, daddy,’ she said, and darted back into bed with her chilled little feet.

  ‘Don’t puth!’ squeaked her lisping younger sister sleepily.

  ‘I’ll give it you!’ muttered Akulína, and both heads disappeared again under the cloak.

  ‘He’ll give me three rubles,’ said Polikéy, corking up the bottle. ‘I’ll cure the horse. It’s even too cheap,’ he added, ‘brain-splitting work! … Akulína, go and ask Nikíta for a little ‘baccy. I’ll pay him back to-morrow.’

  Polikéy took out of his trouser-pocket a lime-wood pipe-stem, which had once been painted, with a sealing-wax mouthpiece, an
d began fixing it onto the bowl.

  Akulína left her spindle and went out, managing to steer clear of everything – though this was not easy. Polikéy opened the cupboard and put away the medicine, then tilted a vodka bottle into his mouth, but it was empty and he made a grimace. But when his wife brought the tobacco he sat down on the edge of the bed, after filling and lighting his pipe, and his face beamed with the content and pride of a man who has completed his day’s task. Whether he was thinking how on the morrow he would catch hold of the horse’s tongue and pour his wonderful mixture down its throat, or reflecting that a useful person never gets a refusal – ‘There, now! Hadn’t Nikíta sent him the tobacco?’ – anyhow he felt happy. Suddenly the door, which hung on one hinge, was thrown open and a maidservant from up there – not the second maid but the third, the little one that was kept to run errands – entered their corner. (Up there, as everyone knows, means the master’s house, even if it stands on lower ground.) Aksyútka – that was the girl’s name – always flew like a bullet, and did it without bending her arms, which keeping time with the speed of her flight swung like pendulums, not at her sides but in front of her. Her cheeks were always redder than her pink dress, and her tongue moved as fast as her legs. She flew into the room, and for some reason catching hold of the stove, began to sway to and fro; then as if intent on not emitting more than two or three words at once, she suddenly addressed Akulína breathlessly as follows:

  ‘The mistress … has given orders … that Polikéy should come this minute … orders to come up.…’

  She stopped, drawing breath with difficulty.

  ‘Egór Mikháylovich has been with the mistress … they talked about rickruits … they mentioned Polikéy … Avdótya Nikoláevna … has ordered him to come this minute … Avdótya Nikoláevna has ordered …’ again a sigh, ‘to come this minute.…’

  For half a minute Aksyútka looked round at Polikéy and at Akulína and the children – who had put out their heads from under their coverlets – picked up a nutshell that lay on the stove and threw it at little Annie. Then she repeated: ‘To come this minute!…’ and rushed out of the room like a whirlwind, the pendulums swinging as usual across her line of flight.

  Akulína again rose and got her husband his boots – abominable soldier’s boots with holes in them – and took down his coat from the stove and handed it to him without looking at him.

  ‘Won’t you change your shirt, Polikéy?’

  ‘No,’ he answered.

  Akulína never once looked at his face while he put on his boots and coat, and she did well not to look. Polikéy’s face was pale, his nether jaw twitched, and in his eyes there was that tearful, meek, and deeply mournful look one only sees in the eyes of kindly, weak, and guilty people. – He combed his hair and was going out; but his wife stopped him, tucked in the string of his shirt that hung down from under his coat, and put his cap on for him.

  ‘What’s that, Polikéy? Has the mistress sent for you?’ came the voice of the carpenter’s wife from behind the partition.

  Only that very morning the carpenter’s wife had had high words with Akulína about her pot of lye4 that Polikéy’s children had upset in her corner, and at first she was pleased to hear Polikéy being summoned to the mistress – most likely for no good. She was a subtle, diplomatic lady, with a biting tongue. Nobody knew better than she how to cut one with a word: so at least she imagined.

  ‘I expect you’ll be sent to town to buy things,’ she continued. ‘I suppose a trusty person is wanted for that job so she is sending you! You might buy me a quarter of a pound of tea there, Polikéy.’

  Akulína forced back her tears, and an angry expression distorted her lips. She felt as if she could have clutched ‘that vixen, the joiner’s wife, by her mangy hair’. But as she looked at her children and thought that they would be left fatherless and she herself be a soldier’s wife and as good as widowed, she forgot the sharp-tongued carpenter’s wife, hid her face in her hands, sat down on the bed, and let her head sink in the pillows.

  ‘Mammy, you’re cwushing me!’ lisped the little girl, pulling the cloak with which she was covered from under her mother’s elbow.

  ‘If only you’d die, all of you! I’ve brought you into the world for nothing but sorrow!’ cried Akulína, and sobbed aloud, to the delight of the carpenter’s wife who had not yet forgotten the lye spilt that morning.

  IV

  HALF an hour passed. The baby began to cry. Akulína got up and gave it the breast. Weeping no longer, but resting her thin though still handsome face on her hand and fixing her eyes on the last flickerings of the candle, she sat thinking why she had married, wondering why so many soldiers were needed, and also how she could pay out the carpenter’s wife.

  She heard her husband’s footsteps and, wiping her tears, got up to let him pass. Polikéy entered like a conqueror, threw his cap on the bed, puffed, and undid his girdle.

  ‘Well, what did she want you for?’

  ‘H’m! Of course! Polikúshka is the least of men … but when there’s business to be done, who’s wanted? Why, Polikúshka.…’

  ‘What business?’

  Polikéy was in no hurry to reply. He lit his pipe and spat.

  ‘To go and fetch money from a merchant.’

  ‘To fetch money?’ Akulína asked.

  Polikéy chuckled and wagged his head.

  ‘Ah! Ain’t she clever at words?… “You have been regarded,” she says, “as an untrustworthy man, but I trust you more than another” ’ (Polikéy spoke loud that the neighbours might hear). ‘ “You promised me you’d reform; here”, she says, “is the first proof that I believe you. Go”, she says, “to the merchant, fetch the money he owes, and bring it back to me.” And I say: “We are all your serfs, ma’am,” I say, “and must serve you as we serve God; so I feel that I can do anything for your honour and cannot refuse any kind of work; whatever you order I will do, because I am your slave.” ’ (He again smiled that peculiar, weak, kindly, guilty smile.) ‘ “Well, then,” she says, “you will do it faithfully?… You understand,” she says, “that your fate depends on it?” – “How could I fail to understand that I can do it all? If they have told tales about me – well, anyone can tell tales about another … but I never in any way, I believe, have even had a thought against your honour …” In a word, I buttered her up till my lady was quite softened.… “I shall think highly of you,” she says.’ (He kept silent a minute, then the smile again appeared on his face.) ‘I know very well how to talk to the likes of them! Formerly, when I used to go out to work on my own, at times someone would come down hard on me; but only let me get in a word or two and I’d butter him up till he’d be as smooth as silk!’

  ‘Is it much money?’

  ‘Fifteen hundred rubles,’ carelessly replied Polikéy.

  She shook her head.

  ‘When are you to go?’

  ‘ “To-morrow,” she says. “Take any horse you like,” she says, “call at the office, and then start and God be with you!” ’

  ‘The Lord be praised!’ said Akulína, rising and crossing herself. ‘May God help you, Polikéy,’ she added in a whisper, so that she might not be heard beyond the partition and holding him by his shirt-sleeve. ‘Polikéy, listen to me! I beseech you in the name of Christ our God: kiss the cross when you start, and promise that not a drop shall pass your lips.’

  ‘A likely thing!’ he ejaculated; ‘drink when carrying all that money! … Ah! how somebody was playing the piano up there! Fine!…’ he said, after a pause, and smiled. ‘I suppose it was the young lady. I was standing like this in front of the mistress, beside the whatnot, and the young lady was rattling away behind the door. She rattled and rattled on, fitting it together so pat! O my! Wouldn’t I like to play a tune! I’d soon master it, I would. I’m awfully good at that sort of thing.… Let me have a clean shirt to-morrow!’

  And they went to bed happy.

  V

  MEANWHILE the meeting in front of the offic
e had been noisy. The business before them was no trifle. Almost all the peasants were present. While the steward was with the mistress they kept their caps on, more voices were heard, and they talked more loudly. The hum of deep voices, interrupted at rare intervals by breathless, husky, and shrill tones, filled the air and, entering through the windows of the mistress’s house, sounded like the noise of a distant sea, making her feel a nervous agitation like that produced by a heavy thunderstorm – a sensation between fear and discomfort. She felt as if the voices might at any moment grow yet louder and faster and then something would happen. ‘As if it could not all be done quietly, peaceably, without disputing and shouting,’ she thought, ‘according to the Christian law of brotherly love and meekness!’