Short Stories by Chekhov
is, I know nothing and I can tell nothing . . ." And at once he added
with a sigh "Cursed life!"
For a minute they stood in silence, without looking at each other.
"So it all came from a trifle, goodness knows how, . . ." said the
waiter, trembling. "I was sitting counting to myself when all at once a
noise. . . . I looked through the door, and just on account of Lenten
oil you. . . . Where is he now?"
"Lying there in the kitchen."
"You ought to take him somewhere. . . . Why put it off?"
Yakov accompanied him to the station without a word, then went home
again and harnessed the horse to take Matvey to Limarovo. He had decided
to take him to the forest of Limarovo, and to leave him there on the
road, and then he would tell everyone that Matvey had gone off to
Vedenyapino and had not come back, and then everyone would think that he
had been killed by someone on the road. He knew there was no deceiving
anyone by this, but to move, to do something, to be active, was not as
agonizing as to sit still and wait. He called Dashutka, and with her
carried Matvey out. Aglaia stayed behind to clean up the kitchen.
When Yakov and Dashutka turned back they were detained at the railway
crossing by the barrier being let down. A long goods train was passing,
dragged by two engines, breathing heavily, and flinging puffs of crimson
fire out of their funnels.
The foremost engine uttered a piercing whistle at the crossing in sight
of the station.
"It's whistling, . . ." said Dashutka.
The train had passed at last, and the signalman lifted the barrier
without haste.
"Is that you, Yakov Ivanitch? I didn't know you, so you'll be rich."
And then when they had reached home they had to go to bed.
Aglaia and Dashutka made themselves a bed in the tea-room and lay down
side by side, while Yakov stretched himself on the counter. They neither
said their prayers nor lighted the ikon lamp before lying down to sleep.
All three lay awake till morning, but did not utter a single word, and
it seemed to them that all night someone was walking about in the empty
storey overhead.
Two days later a police inspector and the examining magistrate came from
the town and made a search, first in Matvey's room and then in the whole
tavern. They questioned Yakov first of all, and he testified that on the
Monday Matvey had gone to Vedenyapino to confess, and that he must have
been killed by the sawyers who were working on the line.
And when the examining magistrate had asked him how it had happened that
Matvey was found on the road, while his cap had turned up at home--surely
he had not gone to Vedenyapino without his cap?-- and why they had not
found a single drop of blood beside him in the snow on the road, though
his head was smashed in and his face and chest were black with blood,
Yakov was confused, lost his head and answered:
"I cannot tell."
And just what Yakov had so feared happened: the policeman came, the
district police officer smoked in the prayer-room and Aglaia fell upon
him with abuse and was rude to the police inspector; and afterwards when
Yakov and Aglaia were led out to the yard, the peasants crowded at the
gates and said, "They are taking the Godlies!" and it seemed that they
were all glad.
At the inquiry the policeman stated positively that Yakov and Aglaia had
killed Matvey in order not to share with him, and that Matvey had money
of his own, and that if it was not found at the search evidently Yakov
and Aglaia had got hold of it. And Dashutka was questioned. She said
that Uncle Matvey and Aunt Aglaia quarrelled and almost fought every day
over money, and that Uncle Matvey was rich, so much so that he had given
someone--"his Darling"--nine hundred roubles.
Dashutka was left alone in the tavern. No one came now to drink tea or
vodka, and she divided her time between cleaning up the rooms, drinking
mead and eating rolls; but a few days later they questioned the
signalman at the railway crossing, and he said that late on Monday
evening he had seen Yakov and Dashutka driving from Limarovo. Dashutka,
too, was arrested, taken to the town and put in prison. It soon became
known, from what Aglaia said, that Sergey Nikanoritch had been present
at the murder. A search was made in his room, and money was found in an
unusual place, in his snowboots under the stove, and the money was all
in small change, three hundred one-rouble notes. He swore he had made
this money himself, and that he hadn't been in the tavern for a year,
but witnesses testified that he was poor and had been in great want of
money of late, and that he used to go every day to the tavern to borrow
from Matvey; and the policeman described how on the day of the murder he
had himself gone twice to the tavern with the waiter to help him to
borrow. It was recalled at this juncture that on Monday evening Sergey
Nikanoritch had not been there to meet the passenger train, but had gone
off somewhere. And he, too, was arrested and taken to the town.
The trial took place eleven months later.
Yakov Ivanitch looked much older and much thinner, and spoke in a low
voice like a sick man. He felt weak, pitiful, lower in stature that
anyone else, and it seemed as though his soul, too, like his body, had
grown older and wasted, from the pangs of his conscience and from the
dreams and imaginings which never left him all the while he was in
prison. When it came out that he did not go to church the president of
the court asked him:
"Are you a dissenter?"
"I can't tell," he answered.
He had no religion at all now; he knew nothing and understood nothing;
and his old belief was hateful to him now, and seemed to him darkness
and folly. Aglaia was not in the least subdued, and she still went on
abusing the dead man, blaming him for all their misfortunes. Sergey
Nikanoritch had grown a beard instead of whiskers. At the trial he was
red and perspiring, and was evidently ashamed of his grey prison coat
and of sitting on the same bench with humble peasants. He defended
himself awkwardly, and, trying to prove that he had not been to the
tavern for a whole year, got into an altercation with every witness, and
the spectators laughed at him. Dashutka had grown fat in prison. At the
trial she did not understand the questions put to her, and only said
that when they killed Uncle Matvey she was dreadfully frightened, but
afterwards she did not mind.
All four were found guilty of murder with mercenary motives. Yakov
Ivanitch was sentenced to penal servitude for twenty years; Aglaia for
thirteen and a half; Sergey Nikanoritch to ten; Dashutka to six. VII
Late one evening a foreign steamer stopped in the roads of Dué in
Sahalin and asked for coal. The captain was asked to wait till morning,
but he did not want to wait over an hour, saying that if the weather
changed for the worse in the night there would be a risk of his having
to go off without coal. In the Gulf of Tartary the weather is liable to
violent changes in the course of half an hour, and then the shores of
Sahalin are dangerous. And already it had turned fresh, and there was a
considerable sea running.
A gang of convicts were sent to the mine from the Voevodsky prison, the
grimmest and most forbidding of all the prisons in Sahalin. The coal had
to be loaded upon barges, and then they had to be towed by a steam-
cutter alongside the steamer which was anchored more than a quarter of a
mile from the coast, and then the unloading and reloading had to
begin--an exhausting task when the barge kept rocking against the steamer
and the men could scarcely keep on their legs for sea-sickness. The
convicts, only just roused from their sleep, still drowsy, went along
the shore, stumbling in the darkness and clanking their fetters. On the
left, scarcely visible, was a tall, steep, extremely gloomy-looking
cliff, while on the right there was a thick impenetrable mist, in which
the sea moaned with a prolonged monotonous sound, "Ah! . . . ah! . . .
ah! . . . ah! . . ." And it was only when the overseer was lighting his
pipe, casting as he did so a passing ray of light on the escort with a
gun and on the coarse faces of two or three of the nearest convicts, or
when he went with his lantern close to the water that the white crests
of the foremost waves could be discerned.
One of this gang was Yakov Ivanitch, nicknamed among the convicts the
"Brush," on account of his long beard. No one had addressed him by his
name or his father's name for a long time now; they called him simply
Yashka.
He was here in disgrace, as, three months after coming to Siberia,
feeling an intense irresistible longing for home, he had succumbed to
temptation and run away; he had soon been caught, had been sentenced to
penal servitude for life and given forty lashes. Then he was punished by
flogging twice again for losing his prison clothes, though on each
occasion they were stolen from him. The longing for home had begun from
the very time he had been brought to Odessa, and the convict train had
stopped in the night at Progonnaya; and Yakov, pressing to the window,
had tried to see his own home, and could see nothing in the darkness. He
had no one with whom to talk of home. His sister Aglaia had been sent
right across Siberia, and he did not know where she was now. Dashutka
was in Sahalin, but she had been sent to live with some ex-convict in a
far away settlement; there was no news of her except that once a settler
who had come to the Voevodsky Prison told Yakov that Dashutka had three
children. Sergey Nikanoritch was serving as a footman at a government
official's at Dué, but he could not reckon on ever seeing him, as he
was ashamed of being acquainted with convicts of the peasant class.
The gang reached the mine, and the men took their places on the quay. It
was said there would not be any loading, as the weather kept getting
worse and the steamer was meaning to set off. They could see three
lights. One of them was moving: that was the steam-cutter going to the
steamer, and it seemed to be coming back to tell them whether the work
was to be done or not. Shivering with the autumn cold and the damp sea
mist, wrapping himself in his short torn coat, Yakov Ivanitch looked
intently without blinking in the direction in which lay his home. Ever
since he had lived in prison together with men banished here from all
ends of the earth--with Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars, Georgians, Chinese,
Gypsies, Jews-- and ever since he had listened to their talk and watched
their sufferings, he had begun to turn again to God, and it seemed to
him at last that he had learned the true faith for which all his family,
from his grandmother Avdotya down, had so thirsted, which they had
sought so long and which they had never found. He knew it all now and
understood where God was, and how He was to be served, and the only
thing he could not understand was why men's destinies were so diverse,
why this simple faith which other men receive from God for nothing and
together with their lives, had cost him such a price that his arms and
legs trembled like a drunken man's from all the horrors and agonies
which as far as he could see would go on without a break to the day of
his death. He looked with strained eyes into the darkness, and it seemed
to him that through the thousand miles of that mist he could see home,
could see his native province, his district, Progonnaya, could see the
darkness, the savagery, the heartlessness, and the dull, sullen, animal
indifference of the men he had left there. His eyes were dimmed with
tears; but still he gazed into the distance where the pale lights of the
steamer faintly gleamed, and his heart ached with yearning for home, and
he longed to live, to go back home to tell them there of his new faith