White nights, and other stories
sister-in-law that it might have been mistaken for one. Having finished
their work they waited for Semyon Ivanovitch to return, meaning to tell
him that his sister-in-law had arrived from the country and was there
behind his screen, poor thing! But they waited and waited.
Already, while they waited, Mark Ivanovitch had staked and lost half a
month's salary to Prepolovenko and Kantarev; already Okeanov's nose had
grown red and swollen playing "flips on the nose" and "three cards;"
already Avdotya the servant had almost had her sleep out and had twice
been on the point of getting up to fetch the wood and light the stove,
and Zinovy Prokofyevitch, who kept running out every minute to see
whether Semyon Ivanovitch were coming, was wet to the skin; but there
was no sign of any one yet--neither Semyon Ivanovitch nor the drunken
cadger. At last every one went to bed, leaving the sister-in-law behind
the screen in readiness for any emergency; and it was not till four
o'clock that a knock was heard at the gate, but when it did come it was
so loud that it quite made up to the expectant lodgers for all the
wearisome trouble they had been through. It was he--he himself--Semyon
Ivanovitch, Mr. Prohartchin, but in such a condition that they all cried
out in dismay, and no one thought about the sister-in-law. The lost man
was unconscious. He was brought in, or more correctly carried in, by a
sopping and tattered night-cabman. To the landlady's question where the
poor dear man had got so groggy, the cabman answered: "Why, he is not
drunk and has not had a drop, that I can tell you, for sure; but
seemingly a faintness has come over him, or some sort of a fit, or maybe
he's been knocked down by a blow."
They began examining him, propping the culprit against the stove to do
so more conveniently, and saw that it really was not a case of
drunkenness, nor had he had a blow, but that something else was wrong,
for Semyon Ivanovitch could not utter a word, but seemed twitching in a
sort of convulsion, and only blinked, fixing his eyes in bewilderment
first on one and then on another of the spectators, who were all attired
in night array. Then they began questioning the cabman, asking where he
had got him from. "Why, from folks out Kolomna way," he answered. "Deuce
knows what they are, not exactly gentry, but merry, rollicking
gentlemen; so he was like this when they gave him to me; whether they
had been fighting, or whether he was in some sort of a fit, goodness
knows what it was; but they were nice, jolly gentlemen!"
Semyon Ivanovitch was taken, lifted high on the shoulders of two or
three sturdy fellows, and carried to his bed. When Semyon Ivanovitch on
being put in bed felt the sister-in-law, and put his feet on his sacred
box, he cried out at the top of his voice, squatted up almost on his
heels, and trembling and shaking all over, with his hands and his body
he cleared a space as far as he could in his bed, while gazing with a
tremulous but strangely resolute look at those present, he seemed as it
were to protest that he would sooner die than give up the hundredth part
of his poor belongings to any one....
Semyon Ivanovitch lay for two or three days closely barricaded by the
screen, and so cut off from all the world and all its vain anxieties.
Next morning, of course, every one had forgotten about him; time,
meanwhile, flew by as usual, hour followed hour and day followed day.
The sick man's heavy, feverish brain was plunged in something between
sleep and delirium; but he lay quietly and did not moan or complain; on
the contrary he kept still and silent and controlled himself, lying low
in his bed, just as the hare lies close to the earth when it hears the
hunter. At times a long depressing stillness prevailed in the flat, a
sign that the lodgers had all gone to the office, and Semyon Ivanovitch,
waking up, could relieve his depression by listening to the bustle in
the kitchen, where the landlady was busy close by; or to the regular
flop of Avdotya's down-trodden slippers as, sighing and moaning, she
cleared away, rubbed and polished, tidying all the rooms in the flat.
Whole hours passed by in that way, drowsy, languid, sleepy, wearisome,
like the water that dripped with a regular sound from the locker into
the basin in the kitchen. At last the lodgers would arrive, one by one
or in groups, and Semyon Ivanovitch could very conveniently hear them
abusing the weather, saying they were hungry, making a noise, smoking,
quarrelling, and making friends, playing cards, and clattering the cups
as they got ready for tea. Semyon Ivanovitch mechanically made an effort
to get up and join them, as he had a right to do at tea; but he at once
sank back into drowsiness, and dreamed that he had been sitting a long
time at the tea-table, having tea with them and talking, and that Zinovy
Prokofyevitch had already seized the opportunity to introduce into the
conversation some scheme concerning sisters-in-law and the moral
relation of various worthy people to them. At this point Semyon
Ivanovitch was in haste to defend himself and reply. But the mighty
formula that flew from every tongue--"It has more than once been
observed"--cut short all his objections, and Semyon Ivanovitch could do
nothing better than begin dreaming again that to-day was the first of
the month and that he was receiving money in his office.
Undoing the paper round it on the stairs, he looked about him quickly,
and made haste as fast as he could to subtract half of the lawful wages
he had received and conceal it in his boot. Then on the spot, on the
stairs, quite regardless of the fact that he was in bed and asleep, he
made up his mind when he reached home to give his landlady what was due
for board and lodging; then to buy certain necessities, and to show any
one it might concern, as it were casually and unintentionally, that some
of his salary had been deducted, that now he had nothing left to send
his sister-in-law; then to speak with commiseration of his
sister-in-law, to say a great deal about her the next day and the day
after, and ten days later to say something casually again about her
poverty, that his companions might not forget. Making this determination
he observed that Andrey Efimovitch, that everlastingly silent, bald
little man who sat in the office three rooms from where Semyon
Ivanovitch sat, and hadn't said a word to him for twenty years, was
standing on the stairs, that he, too, was counting his silver roubles,
and shaking his head, he said to him: "Money!" "If there's no money
there will be no porridge," he added grimly as he went down the stairs,
and just at the door he ended: "And I have seven children, sir." Then
the little bald man, probably equally unconscious that he was acting as
a phantom and not as a substantial reality, held up his hand about
thirty inches from the floor, and waving it vertically, muttered that
the eldest was going to school, then glancing with indignation at Semyon
Ivanovitch, as though it were Mr. Prohartchin's fault that he was the
father of seven, pulled his old hat down over his eyes, and with a whisk
of his overcoat he turned to the left and disappeared. Semyon Ivanovitch
was quite frightened, and though he was fully convinced of his own
innocence in regard to the unpleasant accumulation of seven under one
roof, yet it seemed to appear that in fact no one else was to blame but
Semyon Ivanovitch. Panic-stricken he set off running, for it seemed to
him that the bald gentleman had turned back, was running after him, and
meant to search him and take away all his salary, insisting upon the
indisputable number seven, and resolutely denying any possible claim of
any sort of sisters-in-law upon Semyon Ivanovitch. Prohartchin ran and
ran, gasping for breath.... Beside him was running, too, an immense
number of people, and all of them were jingling their money in the
tailpockets of their skimpy little dress-coats; at last every one ran
up, there was the noise of fire engines, and whole masses of people
carried him almost on their shoulders up to that same house on fire
which he had watched last time in company with the drunken cadger. The
drunken cadger--alias Mr. Zimoveykin--was there now, too, he met Semyon
Ivanovitch, made a fearful fuss, took him by the arm, and led him into
the thickest part of the crowd. Just as then in reality, all about them
was the noise and uproar of an immense crowd of people, flooding the
whole of Fontanka Embankment between the two bridges, as well as all the
surrounding streets and alleys; just as then, Semyon Ivanovitch, in
company with the drunken cadger, was carried along behind a fence, where
they were squeezed as though in pincers in a huge timber-yard full of
spectators who had gathered from the street, from Tolkutchy Market and
from all the surrounding houses, taverns, and restaurants. Semyon
Ivanovitch saw all this and felt as he had done at the time; in the
whirl of fever and delirium all sorts of strange figures began flitting
before him. He remembered some of them. One of them was a gentleman who
had impressed every one extremely, a man seven feet high, with whiskers
half a yard long, who had been standing behind Semyon Ivanovitch's back
during the fire, and had given him encouragement from behind, when our
hero had felt something like ecstasy and had stamped as though intending
thereby to applaud the gallant work of the firemen, from which he had an
excellent view from his elevated position. Another was the sturdy lad
from whom our hero had received a shove by way of a lift on to another
fence, when he had been disposed to climb over it, possibly to save some
one. He had a glimpse, too, of the figure of the old man with a sickly
face, in an old wadded dressing-gown, tied round the waist, who had made
his appearance before the fire in a little shop buying sugar and tobacco
for his lodger, and who now, with a milk-can and a quart pot in his
hands, made his way through the crowd to the house in which his wife and
daughter were burning together with thirteen and a half roubles in the
corner under the bed. But most distinct of all was the poor, sinful
woman of whom he had dreamed more than once during his illness--she
stood before him now as she had done then, in wretched bark shoes and
rags, with a crutch and a wicker-basket on her back. She was shouting
more loudly than the firemen or the crowd, waving her crutch and her
arms, saying that her own children had turned her out and that she had
lost two coppers in consequence. The children and the coppers, the
coppers and the children, were mingled together in an utterly
incomprehensible muddle, from which every one withdrew baffled, after
vain efforts to understand. But the woman would not desist, she kept
wailing, shouting, and waving her arms, seeming to pay no attention
either to the fire up to which she had been carried by the crowd from
the street or to the people about her, or to the misfortune of
strangers, or even to the sparks and red-hot embers which were beginning
to fall in showers on the crowd standing near. At last Mr. Prohartchin
felt that a feeling of terror was coming upon him; for he saw clearly
that all this was not, so to say, an accident, and that he would not get
off scot-free. And, indeed, upon the woodstack, close to him, was a
peasant, in a torn smock that hung loose about him, with his hair and
beard singed, and he began stirring up all the people against Semyon
Ivanovitch. The crowd pressed closer and closer, the peasant shouted,
and foaming at the mouth with horror, Mr. Prohartchin suddenly realized
that this peasant was a cabman whom he had cheated five years before in
the most inhuman way, slipping away from him without paying through a