Short Stories
horse was moving with effort, and from time to time the peasant's call
"come up!" floated upwards to me. I knew almost all our peasants, but I did
not know which it was ploughing now, and I did not care who it was, I was
absorbed in my own affairs. I was busy, too; I was breaking off switches
from the nut trees to whip the frogs with. Nut sticks make such fine whips,
but they do not last; while birch twigs are just the opposite. I was
interested, too, in beetles and other insects; I used to collect them, some
were very ornamental. I was very fond, too, of the little nimble red and
yellow lizards with black spots on them, but I was afraid of snakes.
Snakes, however, were much more rare than lizards. There were not many
mushrooms there. To get mushrooms one had to go to the birch wood, and I
was about to set off there. And there was nothing in the world that I loved
so much as the wood with its mushrooms and wild berries, with its beetles
and its birds, its hedgehogs and squirrels, with its damp smell of dead
leaves which I loved so much, and even as I write I smell the fragrance of
our birch wood: these impressions will remain for my whole life. Suddenly
in the midst of the profound stillness I heard a clear and distinct shout,
"Wolf!" I shrieked and, beside myself with terror, calling out at the top
of my voice, ran out into the clearing and straight to the peasant who was
ploughing.
It was our peasant Marey. I don't know if there is such a name, but every
one called him Marey--a thick-set, rather well-grown peasant of fifty, with
a good many grey hairs in his dark brown, spreading beard. I knew him, but
had scarcely ever happened to speak to him till then. He stopped his horse
on hearing my cry, and when, breathless, I caught with one hand at his
plough and with the other at his sleeve, he saw how frightened I was.
"There is a wolf!" I cried, panting.
He flung up his head, and could not help looking round for an instant,
almost believing me.
"Where is the wolf?"
"A shout ... some one shouted: 'wolf' ..." I faltered out.
"Nonsense, nonsense! A wolf? Why, it was your fancy! How could there be a
wolf?" he muttered, reassuring me. But I was trembling all over, and still
kept tight hold of his smock frock, and I must have been quite pale. He
looked at me with an uneasy smile, evidently anxious and troubled over me.
"Why, you have had a fright, _aïe, aïe_!" He shook his head. "There,
dear.... Come, little one, _aïe_!"
He stretched out his hand, and all at once stroked my cheek.
"Come, come, there; Christ be with you! Cross yourself!"
But I did not cross myself. The corners of my mouth were twitching, and I
think that struck him particularly. He put out his thick, black-nailed,
earth-stained finger and softly touched my twitching lips.
"_Aïe_, there, there," he said to me with a slow, almost motherly smile.
"Dear, dear, what is the matter? There; come, come!"
I grasped at last that there was no wolf, and that the shout that I had
heard was my fancy. Yet that shout had been so clear and distinct, but such
shouts (not only about wolves) I had imagined once or twice before, and I
was aware of that. (These hallucinations passed away later as I grew
older.)
"Well, I will go then," I said, looking at him timidly and inquiringly.
"Well, do, and I'll keep watch on you as you go. I won't let the wolf get
at you," he added, still smiling at me with the same motherly expression.
"Well, Christ be with you! Come, run along then," and he made the sign of
the cross over me and then over himself. I walked away, looking back almost
at every tenth step. Marey stood still with his mare as I walked away, and
looked after me and nodded to me every time I looked round. I must own I
felt a little ashamed at having let him see me so frightened, but I was
still very much afraid of the wolf as I walked away, until I reached the
first barn half-way up the slope of the ravine; there my fright vanished
completely, and all at once our yard-dog Voltchok flew to meet me. With
Voltchok I felt quite safe, and I turned round to Marey for the last time;
I could not see his face distinctly, but I felt that he was still nodding
and smiling affectionately to me. I waved to him; he waved back to me and
started his little mare. "Come up!" I heard his call in the distance again,
and the little mare pulled at the plough again.
All this I recalled all at once, I don't know why, but with extraordinary
minuteness of detail. I suddenly roused myself and sat up on the
platform-bed, and, I remember, found myself still smiling quietly at my
memories. I brooded over them for another minute.
When I got home that day I told no one of my "adventure" with Marey. And
indeed it was hardly an adventure. And in fact I soon forgot Marey. When I
met him now and then afterwards, I never even spoke to him about the wolf
or anything else; and all at once now, twenty years afterwards in Siberia,
I remembered this meeting with such distinctness to the smallest detail. So
it must have lain hidden in my soul, though I knew nothing of it, and rose
suddenly to my memory when it was wanted; I remembered the soft motherly
smile of the poor serf, the way he signed me with the cross and shook his
head. "There, there, you have had a fright, little one!" And I remembered
particularly the thick earth-stained finger with which he softly and with
timid tenderness touched my quivering lips. Of course any one would have
reassured a child, but something quite different seemed to have happened in
that solitary meeting; and if I had been his own son, he could not have
looked at me with eyes shining with greater love. And what made him like
that? He was our serf and I was his little master, after all. No one would
know that he had been kind to me and reward him for it. Was he, perhaps,
very fond of little children? Some people are. It was a solitary meeting in
the deserted fields, and only God, perhaps, may have seen from above with
what deep and humane civilised feeling, and with what delicate, almost
feminine tenderness, the heart of a coarse, brutally ignorant Russian serf,
who had as yet no expectation, no idea even of his freedom, may be filled.
Was not this, perhaps, what Konstantin Aksakov meant when he spoke of the
high degree of culture of our peasantry?
And when I got down off the bed and looked around me, I remember I suddenly
felt that I could look at these unhappy creatures with quite different
eyes, and that suddenly by some miracle all hatred and anger had vanished
utterly from my heart. I walked about, looking into the faces that I met.
That shaven peasant, branded on his face as a criminal, bawling his
hoarse, drunken song, may be that very Marey; I cannot look into his heart.
I met M. again that evening. Poor fellow! he could have no memories of
Russian peasants, and no other view of these people but: "_Je haïs ces
brigands!_" Yes, the Polish prisoners had more to bear than I.
THE CROCODILE
AN EXTRAORDINARY INCIDENT
_A true story of how a gentleman of a certain age and of
respectable appearance was swallowed alive by the crocodile
in the Arcade, and of the consequences that followed._
Ohé Lambert! Où est Lambert?
As tu vu Lambert?
I
On the thirteenth of January of this present year, 1865, at half-past
twelve in the day, Elena Ivanovna, the wife of my cultured friend Ivan
Matveitch, who is a colleague in the same department, and may be said to be
a distant relation of mine, too, expressed the desire to see the crocodile
now on view at a fixed charge in the Arcade. As Ivan Matveitch had already
in his pocket his ticket for a tour abroad (not so much for the sake of his
health as for the improvement of his mind), and was consequently free from
his official duties and had nothing whatever to do that morning, he offered
no objection to his wife's irresistible fancy, but was positively aflame
with curiosity himself.
"A capital idea!" he said, with the utmost satisfaction. "We'll have a look
at the crocodile! On the eve of visiting Europe it is as well to acquaint
ourselves on the spot with its indigenous inhabitants." And with these
words, taking his wife's arm, he set off with her at once for the Arcade. I
joined them, as I usually do, being an intimate friend of the family. I
have never seen Ivan Matveitch in a more agreeable frame of mind than he
was on that memorable morning--how true it is that we know not beforehand
the fate that awaits us! On entering the Arcade he was at once full of
admiration for the splendours of the building, and when we reached the shop
in which the monster lately arrived in Petersburg was being exhibited, he
volunteered to pay the quarter-rouble for me to the crocodile owner--a
thing which had never happened before. Walking into a little room, we
observed that besides the crocodile there were in it parrots of the species
known as cockatoo, and also a group of monkeys in a special case in a
recess. Near the entrance, along the left wall stood a big tin tank that
looked like a bath covered with a thin iron grating, filled with water to
the depth of two inches. In this shallow pool was kept a huge crocodile,
which lay like a log absolutely motionless and apparently deprived of all
its faculties by our damp climate, so inhospitable to foreign visitors.
This monster at first aroused no special interest in any one of us.
"So this is the crocodile!" said Elena Ivanovna, with a pathetic cadence of
regret. "Why, I thought it was ... something different."
Most probably she thought it was made of diamonds. The owner of the
crocodile, a German, came out and looked at us with an air of extraordinary
pride.
"He has a right to be," Ivan Matveitch whispered to me, "he knows he is the
only man in Russia exhibiting a crocodile."
This quite nonsensical observation I ascribe also to the extremely
good-humoured mood which had overtaken Ivan Matveitch, who was on other
occasions of rather envious disposition.
"I fancy your crocodile is not alive," said Elena Ivanovna, piqued by the
irresponsive stolidity of the proprietor, and addressing him with a
charming smile in order to soften his churlishness--a manoeuvre so
typically feminine.
"Oh, no, madam," the latter replied in broken Russian; and instantly
moving the grating half off the tank, he poked the monster's head with a
stick.
Then the treacherous monster, to show that it was alive, faintly stirred
its paws and tail, raised its snout and emitted something like a prolonged
snuffle.
"Come, don't be cross, Karlchen," said the German caressingly, gratified in
his vanity.
"How horrid that crocodile is! I am really frightened," Elena Ivanovna
twittered, still more coquettishly. "I know I shall dream of him now."
"But he won't bite you if you do dream of him," the German retorted
gallantly, and was the first to laugh at his own jest, but none of us
responded.
"Come, Semyon Semyonitch," said Elena Ivanovna, addressing me exclusively,
"let us go and look at the monkeys. I am awfully fond of monkeys; they are
such darlings ... and the crocodile is horrid."
"Oh, don't be afraid, my dear!" Ivan Matveitch called after us, gallantly
displaying his manly courage to his wife. "This drowsy denison of the
realms of the Pharaohs will do us no harm." And he remained by the tank.
What is more, he took his glove and began tickling the crocodile's nose
with it, wishing, as he said afterwards, to induce him to snort. The
proprietor showed his politeness to a lady by following Elena Ivanovna to
the case of monkeys.
So everything was going well, and nothing could have been foreseen. Elena
Ivanovna was quite skittish in her raptures over the monkeys, and seemed