They would stand side by side in the boat, she laughing, and he never lifting his eyes from her. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Semion, even in Siberia people live, and are happy. See what a daughter I’ve got! you might go a thousand versts and never see another like her.’ The daughter, as I said, was really good-looking. ‘But wait a little,’ I used to say to myself, ‘the girl is young, the blood flows in her veins, she wants to live; and what is life here?’ Anyway, brother, she began to grieve. Pined and declined, dwindled away, got ill, and now can’t stand on her legs. Consumption! There’s your Siberian happiness! That’s the way people live in Siberia!… And my Vassili Sergeyitch spends his time driving about to doctors and bringing them home. Once let him hear there’s a doctor or a magic curer within two or three hundred versts, and after him he must go…. It’s terrible to think of the amount of money he spends, he might as well drink it…. She’ll die all the same, nothing’ll save her, and then he’ll be altogether lost. Whether he hangs himself from grief or runs off to Russia it’s all the same. If he runs away they’ll catch him, then we’ll have a trial and penal servitude, and the rest of it….»
«It was very well for him,» said the Tartar, shuddering with the cold.
«What was well?»
«Wife and daughter…. Whatever he suffers, whatever punishment he’ll have, at any rate he saw them…. You say you don’t want anything. But to have nothing is bad. His wife lived with him three years, God granted him that. To have nothing is bad, but three years is good. You don’t understand.»
Trembling with cold, finding only with painful difficulty the proper Russian words, the Tartar began to beg that God might save him from dying in a strange land, and being buried in the cold earth. If his wife were to come to him, even for one day, even for one hour, for such happiness he would consent to undergo the most frightful tortures, and thank God for them. Better one day’s happiness than nothing!
And he again told the story of how he had left at home a handsome and clever wife. Then, putting both his hands to his head, he began to cry, and to assure Semion that he was guilty of nothing, and was suffering unjustly. His two brothers and his uncle had stolen a peasant’s horses, and beaten the old man half to death. But society had treated him unfairly, and sent the three brothers to Siberia, while the uncle, a rich man, remained at home.
«You’ll get used to it!» said Semion.
The Tartar said nothing, and only turned his wet eyes on the fire; his face expressed doubt and alarm, as if he did not yet understand why he lay there in darkness and in cold among strangers, and not at Simbirsk. Wiseacre lay beside the fire, laughed silently at something, and hummed a tune.
«What happiness can she have with her father?» he began after a few minutes’ silence. «He loves her, and finds her a consolation, that’s true But you can’t put your finger in his eyes; he’s a cross old man, a stern old man. And with young girls you don’t want sternness. What they want is caresses, and ha! ha! ha! and ho! ho! ho!—perfume and pomade. Yes … Akh, business, business!» He sighed, lifting himself clumsily. «Vodka all gone—means it’s time to go to bed. Well, I’m off, brother.»
The Tartar added some more brushwood to the fire, lay down again, and began to think of his native village and of his wife; if his wife would only come for a week, for a day, let her go back if she liked! Better a few days, even a day, than nothing! But if his wife kept her promise and came, what would he feed her with? Where would she live?
«How can you live without anything to eat?» he asked aloud.
For working day and night at an oar they paid him only ten kopecks a day. True, passengers sometimes gave money for tea and vodka, but the others shared this among themselves, gave nothing to the Tartar, and only laughed at him. From poverty he was hungry, cold, and frightened. His whole body ached and trembled. If he went into the hut there would be nothing for him to cover himself with. Here, too, he had nothing to cover himself with, but he might keep up the fire.
In a week the waters would have fallen, and the ferrymen, with the exception of Semion, would no longer be wanted. The Tartar must begin his tramp from village to village asking for bread and work. His wife was only seventeen years old; she was pretty, modest, and spoiled. How could she tramp with uncovered face through the villages and ask for bread? It was too horrible to think of.
When next the Tartar looked up it was dawn. The barge, the willows, and the ripples stood out plainly. You might turn round and see the clayey slope, with its brown thatched hut at the bottom, and above it the huts of the village. In the village the cocks already crowed.
The clayey slope, the barge, the river, the strange wicked people, hunger, cold, sickness—in reality there was none of this at all. It was only a dream, thought the Tartar. He felt that he was sleeping, and heard himself snore. Of course, he was at home in Simbirsk, he had only to call his wife by name and she would call bock; in the next room lay his old mother…. What terrible things are dreams!… Where do they come from?… The Tartar smiled and opened his eyes. What river was this? The Volga?
It began to snow.
«Ahoy!» came a voice from the other side, «boatman!»
The Tartar shook himself, and went to awaken his companions. Dragging on their sheepskin coats on the way, swearing in voices hoarse from sleep, the ferrymen appeared on the bank. After sleep, the river, with its piercing breeze, evidently seemed to them a nightmare. They tumbled lazily into the boat. The Tartar and three ferrymen took up the long, wide-bladed oars which looked in the darkness like the claws of a crab. Semion threw himself on his stomach across the helm. On the opposite bank the shouting continued, and twice revolver shots were heal’d. The stranger evidently thought that the ferrymen were asleep or had gone into the village to the kabak.
«You’ll get across in time,» said Wiseacre in the tone of a man who is convinced that in this world there is no need for hurry. «It’s all the same in the end; you’ll gain nothing by making a noise.»
The heavy, awkward barge parted from the bank, cleaving a path through the willows, and only the slow movement of the willows backward showed that it was moving at all. The ferrymen slowly raised their oars in time. Wiseacre lay on his stomach across the helm, and, describing a bow in the air, swung slowly from one side to the other. In the dim light it seemed as if the men were sitting on some long-clawed antediluvian animal, floating with it into the cold desolate land that is sometimes seen in nightmares.
The willows soon were passed and the open water reached. On the other bank the creak and measured dipping of the oars were already audible, and cries of «Quicker, quicker!» came back across the water. Ten minutes more and the barge struck heavily against the landing-stage.
«It keeps on falling, it keeps on falling,» grumbled Semion, rubbing the snow from his face. «Where it all comes from God only knows!»
On the bank stood a frail old man of low stature in a short foxskin coat and white lambskin cap. He stood immovable at some distance from the horses; his face had a gloomy concentrated expression, as if he were trying to remember something, and were angry with his disobedient memory. When Semion approached him, and, smiling, took off his cap, he began:
«I am going in great haste to Anastasevki. My daughter is worse. In Anastasevka, I am told, a new doctor has been appointed.»
The ferrymen dragged the cart on to the barge, and started back. The man, whom Semion called Vassili Sergeyitch, stood all the time immovable, tightly compressing his thick fingers, and when the driver asked for permission to smoke in his presence, answered nothing, as if he had not heard. Semion, lying on his stomach across the helm, looked at him maliciously, and said:
«Even in Siberia people live! Even in Siberia!» Wiseacre’s face bore a triumphant expression, as if he had demonstrated something, and rejoiced that things had justified his prediction. The miserable, helpless expression of the man in the foxskin coat evidently only increased his delight.
«It’s muddy travelling at this time, Vassili Sergeyitch,» he said, as they harnessed the horses on the river bank. «You might have waited another week or two till it got drier. For the matter of that, you might just as well not go at all…. If there was any sense in going it would be another matter, but you yourself know that you might go on for ever and nothing would come of it…. Well?»
Vassili Sergeyitch silently handed the men some money, climbed into the cart, and drove off.
«After that doctor again,» said Semion, shuddering from the cold. «Yes, look for a real doctor—chase the wind in the field, seize the devil by the tail, damn him. Akh, what characters these people
