Forty Stories

On Semyon’s face there was an expression of triumph, as though he had proved something and rejoiced that everything had happened as he predicted. The miserable, helpless look on the face of the man in the jacket lined with fox fur evidently afforded him great satisfaction.

“It’s muddy traveling this time of the year, Vassily Sergeich,” he said while they were harnessing the horses on the riverbank. “You’d have done better to wait a week or two, when it gets drier. Or better still, given up the journey.… It might be worthwhile if any good could come out of it, but as you know yourself, people have been driving about for ages and ages, and day and night too, and nothing ever came of it. That’s the truth!”

In silence Vassily Sergeich handed them some vodka money, climbed into the carriage, and drove away.

“So he’s chasing after a doctor,” said Semyon, shuddering with cold. “Looking for a real doctor is like hunting the wind across the fields or taking the devil by the hind leg, damn it all! What queer fellows, eh? Lord have mercy on me!”

The Tartar went up to Semyon, looking at him with hatred and horror, trembling all over, and, mixing Tartar words with his broken Russian, said: “He is good … good, but you … you are bad! You are bad! Gentleman is good soul, fine man, you … you are beast, horrible! Gentleman is alive, you are carcass.… God created man to be alive, to be happy and sad and full of sorrow, but you … you want nothing. You not alive, you stone, lump of clay! Stone want nothing, and you want nothing! You are stone, and God does not love you. God loves gentleman!”

They all laughed at him, and the Tartar frowned contemptuously, and with a wave of his hand he wrapped himself in his rags and went up to the fire. Semyon and the ferrymen went off to the hut.

“It’s cold,” one of the ferrymen said in a hoarse voice, stretching himself on the straw which littered the damp clay floor.

“Well, it’s not warm,” another agreed. “It’s a convict’s life all right!”

They were all lying down. The door was blown open by the wind, and snow poured into the hut. No one wanted to get up and close the door; it was cold, and they were lazy.

“I’m all right,” said Semyon, going off to sleep. “God give everyone such a life!”

“Seven years’ hard labor, and everyone knows it. The devil himself wouldn’t have you!”

From outside came a sound like a dog howling.

“What’s that? Who’s there?”

“It’s the Tartar crying.”

“Well, he’s a queer one!”

“Oh, he’ll get used to it,” Semyon said, and he went off to sleep.

Soon all the others were asleep. And the door remained unclosed.

May 1892

¹ He means a prisoner on parole, forced to live in Siberia.

Big Volodya and Little Volodya

“PLEASE let me drive! I’ll go and sit with the driver!” Sophia Lvovna said in a loud voice. “Wait a moment, driver! I’m coming to sit beside you!”

She stood up in the sleigh, and her husband, Vladimir Nikitich, and the friend of her childhood, Vladimir Mikhailovich, both held her hands to prevent her from falling. The troika was moving fast.

“I said she should never have touched the brandy,” Vladimir Nikitich said in annoyance as he turned to his companion. “You’re some fellow, eh?”

The colonel knew from experience that after even a moderate amount of drinking women like Sophia Lvovna often give way to hysterical laughter and then tears. He was afraid that when they reached home, instead of going to sleep, he would spend the night administering compresses and pouring out medicines.

“Whoa there!” Sophia Lvovna shouted. “I want to drive!”

She felt genuinely happy and on top of the world. For the last two months, ever since her wedding, she had tormented herself with the thought that she had married Colonel Yagich for his money and, as they say, par depit; but that day, in a surburban restaurant, she came suddenly and finally to the conclusion that she loved him passionately. In spite of his fifty-four years he was so finely built, so agile and sinewy, and he was always making exquisite puns and accompanying gypsy bands. It is quite true that older men nowadays are a thousand times more interesting than the young: it seems as though age and youth have exchanged roles. The colonel was two years older than her father, but such a fact could have no significance when, to tell the truth, he had infinitely more vitality, vigor, and youthfulness than she had, and she was only twenty-three.

“Oh, my darling!” she thought. “How wonderful you are!”

In the restaurant she came to the conclusion that there was not one spark of her old feeling for her childhood friend left. For this friend, Vladimir Mikhailovich, or simply Volodya, she had felt only the day before an insane and desperate passion; now she was completely indifferent to him. All evening he had seemed stupid, dull, uninteresting, insignificant; and the way he cold-bloodedly and continually escaped paying the restaurant checks had shocked her, and so she had only just been able to resist telling him: “Why don’t you stay at home, if you are so poor?” The colonel paid for everything.

Perhaps because trees, telephone poles, and snowdrifts were flitting past her eyes, all kinds of disconnected thoughts were passing through her brain. She remembered now that the check at the restaurant amounted to a hundred and twenty rubles, and there was another hundred rubles for the gypsies, and tomorrow she could throw a thousand rubles away if she wanted to, while only two months ago, before her wedding, she had not three rubles to her name, and had to beg her father for the least little thing. How things had changed!

Her thoughts were confused. It occurred to her that when she was ten years old her present husband, Colonel Yagich, was flirting with her aunt, and everyone at home said he had ruined her, and it was perfectly true that her aunt came down to dinner with tears in her eyes and was always going off somewhere; and they said of her that she would never find any peace. He was extremely handsome in those days and had extraordinary success with