Short Stories
"No, your Excellency, I am only the lower court councillor Lebeziatnikov,
at your service, but General Pervoyedov...."
"Nonsense! And I beg you to leave me alone."
"Let him be." General Pervoyedov at last himself checked with dignity the
disgusting officiousness of his sycophant in the grave.
"He is not fully awake, your Excellency, you must consider that; it's the
novelty of it all. When he is fully awake he will take it differently."
"Let him be," repeated the general.
* * * * *
"Vassili Vassilitch! Hey, your Excellency!" a perfectly new voice shouted
loudly and aggressively from close beside Avdotya Ignatyevna. It was a
voice of gentlemanly insolence, with the languid pronunciation now
fashionable and an arrogant drawl. "I've been watching you all for the last
two hours. Do you remember me, Vassili Vassilitch? My name is Klinevitch,
we met at the Volokonskys' where you, too, were received as a guest, I am
sure I don't know why."
"What, Count Pyotr Petrovitch?... Can it be really you ... and at such an
early age? How sorry I am to hear it."
"Oh, I am sorry myself, though I really don't mind, and I want to amuse
myself as far as I can everywhere. And I am not a count but a baron, only a
baron. We are only a set of scurvy barons, risen from being flunkeys, but
why I don't know and I don't care. I am only a scoundrel of the
pseudo-aristocratic society, and I am regarded as 'a charming _polis-son_.'
My father is a wretched little general, and my mother was at one time
received _en haut lieu_. With the help of the Jew Zifel I forged fifty
thousand rouble notes last year and then I informed against him, while
Julie Charpentier de Lusignan carried off the money to Bordeaux. And only
fancy, I was engaged to be married--to a girl still at school, three months
under sixteen, with a dowry of ninety thousand. Avdotya Ignatyevna, do you
remember how you seduced me fifteen years ago when I was a boy of fourteen
in the Corps des Pages?"
"Ah, that's you, you rascal! Well, you are a godsend, anyway, for here...."
"You were mistaken in suspecting your neighbour, the business gentleman,
of unpleasant fragrance.... I said nothing, but I laughed. The stench came
from me: they had to bury me in a nailed-up coffin."
"Ugh, you horrid creature! Still, I am glad you are here; you can't imagine
the lack of life and wit here."
"Quite so, quite so, and I intend to start here something original. Your
Excellency--I don't mean you, Pervoyedov--your Excellency the other one,
Tarasevitch, the privy councillor! Answer! I am Klinevitch, who took you to
Mlle. Furie in Lent, do you hear?"
"I do, Klinevitch, and I am delighted, and trust me...."
"I wouldn't trust you with a halfpenny, and I don't care. I simply want to
kiss you, dear old man, but luckily I can't. Do you know, gentlemen, what
this _grand-père's_ little game was? He died three or four days ago, and
would you believe it, he left a deficit of four hundred thousand government
money from the fund for widows and orphans. He was the sole person in
control of it for some reason, so that his accounts were not audited for
the last eight years. I can fancy what long faces they all have now, and
what they call him. It's a delectable thought, isn't it? I have been
wondering for the last year how a wretched old man of seventy, gouty and
rheumatic, succeeded in preserving the physical energy for his
debaucheries--and now the riddle is solved! Those widows and orphans--the
very thought of them must have egged him on! I knew about it long ago, I
was the only one who did know; it was Julie told me, and as soon as I
discovered it, I attacked him in a friendly way at once in Easter week:
'Give me twenty-five thousand, if you don't they'll look into your accounts
to-morrow.' And just fancy, he had only thirteen thousand left then, so it
seems it was very apropos his dying now. _Grand-père, grand-père_, do you
hear?"
"_Cher_ Klinevitch, I quite agree with you, and there was no need for
you ... to go into such details. Life is so full of suffering and
torment and so little to make up for it ... that I wanted at last to be
at rest, and so far as I can see I hope to get all I can from here too."
"I bet that he has already sniffed Katiche Berestov!"
"Who? What Katiche?" There was a rapacious quiver in the old man's voice.
"A-ah, what Katiche? Why, here on the left, five paces from me and ten from
you. She has been here for five days, and if only you knew, _grand-père_,
what a little wretch she is! Of good family and breeding and a monster, a
regular monster! I did not introduce her to any one there, I was the only
one who knew her.... Katiche, answer!"
"He-he-he!" the girl responded with a jangling laugh, in which there was a
note of something as sharp as the prick of a needle. "He-he-he!"
"And a little blonde?" the _grand-père_ faltered, drawling out the
syllables.
"He-he-he!"
"I ... have long ... I have long," the old man faltered breathlessly,
"cherished the dream of a little fair thing of fifteen and just in such
surroundings."
"Ach, the monster!" cried Avdotya Ignatyevna.
"Enough!" Klinevitch decided. "I see there is excellent material. We shall
soon arrange things better. The great thing is to spend the rest of our
time cheerfully; but what time? Hey, you, government clerk, Lebeziatnikov
or whatever it is, I hear that's your name!"
"Semyon Yevseitch Lebeziatnikov, lower court councillor, at your service,
very, very, very much delighted to meet you."
"I don't care whether you are delighted or not, but you seem to know
everything here. Tell me first of all how it is we can talk? I've been
wondering ever since yesterday. We are dead and yet we are talking and seem
to be moving--and yet we are not talking and not moving. What jugglery is
this?"
"If you want an explanation, baron, Platon Nikolaevitch could give you one
better than I."
"What Platon Nikolaevitch is that? To the point. Don't beat about the
bush."
"Platon Nikolaevitch is our home-grown philosopher, scientist and Master of
Arts. He has brought out several philosophical works, but for the last
three months he has been getting quite drowsy, and there is no stirring him
up now. Once a week he mutters something utterly irrelevant."
"To the point, to the point!"
"He explains all this by the simplest fact, namely, that when we were
living on the surface we mistakenly thought that death there was death. The
body revives, as it were, here, the remains of life are concentrated, but
only in consciousness. I don't know how to express it, but life goes on, as
it were, by inertia. In his opinion everything is concentrated somewhere in
consciousness and goes on for two or three months ... sometimes even for
half a year.... There is one here, for instance, who is almost completely
decomposed, but once every six weeks he suddenly utters one word, quite
senseless of course, about some _bobok_,[1] 'Bobok, bobok,' but you see
that an imperceptible speck of life is still warm within him."
[Footnote 1: _i. e._ small bean.]
"It's rather stupid. Well, and how is it I have no sense of smell and yet I
feel there's a stench?"
"That ... he-he.... Well, on that point our philosopher is a bit foggy.
It's apropos of smell, he said, that the stench one perceives here is, so
to speak, moral--he-he! It's the stench of the soul, he says, that in these
two or three months it may have time to recover itself ... and this is, so
to speak, the last mercy.... Only, I think, baron, that these are mystic
ravings very excusable in his position...."
"Enough; all the rest of it, I am sure, is nonsense. The great thing is
that we have two or three months more of life and then--bobok! I propose
to spend these two months as agreeably as possible, and so to arrange
everything on a new basis. Gentlemen! I propose to cast aside all shame."
"Ah, let us cast aside all shame, let us!" many voices could be heard
saying; and strange to say, several new voices were audible, which must
have belonged to others newly awakened. The engineer, now fully awake,
boomed out his agreement with peculiar delight. The girl Katiche giggled
gleefully.
"Oh, how I long to cast off all shame!" Avdotya Ignatyevna exclaimed
rapturously.
"I say, if Avdotya Ignatyevna wants to cast off all shame...."
"No, no, no, Klinevitch, I was ashamed up there all the same, but here I
should like to cast off shame, I should like it awfully."
"I understand, Klinevitch," boomed the engineer, "that you want to
rearrange life here on new and rational principles."
"Oh, I don't care a hang about that! For that we'll wait for Kudeyarov who
was brought here yesterday. When he wakes he'll tell you all about it. He
is such a personality, such a titanic personality! To-morrow they'll bring
along another natural scientist, I believe, an officer for certain, and
three or four days later a journalist, and, I believe, his editor with him.
But deuce take them all, there will be a little group of us anyway, and
things will arrange themselves. Though meanwhile I don't want us to be
telling lies. That's all I care about, for that is one thing that matters.
One cannot exist on the surface without lying, for life and lying are
synonymous, but here we will amuse ourselves by not lying. Hang it all, the
grave has some value after all! We'll all tell our stories aloud, and we
won't be ashamed of anything. First of all I'll tell you about myself. I am
one of the predatory kind, you know. All that was bound and held in check
by rotten cords up there on the surface. Away with cords and let us spend
these two months in shameless truthfulness! Let us strip and be naked!"
"Let us be naked, let us be naked!" cried all the voices.
"I long to be naked, I long to be," Avdotya Ignatyevna shrilled.
"Ah ... ah, I see we shall have fun here; I don't want Ecke after all."
"No, I tell you. Give me a taste of life!"
"He-he-he!" giggled Katiche.
"The great thing is that no one can interfere with us, and though I see
Pervoyedov is in a temper, he can't reach me with his hand. _Grand-père_,
do you agree?"
"I fully agree, fully, and with the utmost satisfaction, but on condition
that Katiche is the first to give us her biography."
"I protest! I protest with all my heart!" General Pervoyedov brought out
firmly.
"Your Excellency!" the scoundrel Lebeziatnikov persuaded him in a murmur of
fussy excitement, "your Excellency, it will be to our advantage to agree.
Here, you see, there's this girl's ... and all their little affairs."
"There's the girl, it's true, but...."
"It's to our advantage, your Excellency, upon my word it is! If only as an
experiment, let us try it...."
"Even in the grave they won't let us rest in peace."
"In the first place, General, you were playing preference in the grave, and
in the second we don't care a hang about you," drawled Klinevitch.
"Sir, I beg you not to forget yourself."
"What? Why, you can't get at me, and I can tease you from here as though
you were Julie's lapdog. And another thing, gentlemen, how is he a general
here? He was a general there, but here is mere refuse."
"No, not mere refuse.... Even here...."
"Here you will rot in the grave and six brass buttons will be all that will
be left of you."
"Bravo, Klinevitch, ha-ha-ha!" roared voices.
"I have served my sovereign.... I have the sword...."
"Your sword is only fit to prick mice, and you never drew it even for
that."
"That makes no difference; I formed a part of the whole."
"There are all sorts of parts in a whole."
"Bravo, Klinevitch, bravo! Ha-ha-ha!"
"I don't understand what the sword stands for," boomed the engineer.
"We shall run away from the Prussians like mice, they'll crush us to