IV
AND IN THE town of Afimyevsk, I’ll tell you now, here’s what a wonder we had. There lived a merchant named Skotoboinikov,8 Maxim Ivanovich, and there was nobody richer than he in the whole region. He built a calico factory and employed several hundred workers; and he became conceited beyond measure. And it must be said that everything walked at a sign from him, and the authorities themselves didn’t hinder him in anything, and the abbot of the monastery thanked him for his zeal: he donated a lot to the monastery, and when the fancy took him, he sighed greatly for his soul and had no little concern for the age to come. He was a widower and childless; about his wife, rumor had it that he sweetened her away in the first year and that since his youth he had always liked making free with his hands; only that was a very long time back; he never wanted to enter the bonds of matrimony again. He also had a weakness for drink, and when the time came on him, he would run drunkenly around town, naked and yelling; the town was nothing grand, but still it was a shame. When the time was over, he’d get irate, and then everything he decided was good, and everything he ordered was wonderful. And he settled accounts with people arbitrarily; he’d take an abacus, put his spectacles on: “How much for you, Foma?” “Haven’t had anything since Christmas, Maxim Ivanovich, there’s thirty-nine roubles owing to me.” “Oof, that’s a lot of money! It’s too much for you; the whole of you isn’t worth such money; it doesn’t suit you at all; let’s knock off ten roubles, and you’ll get twenty-nine.” The man says nothing; and nobody else dares to make a peep, they all say nothing.
“I know how much he should be given,” he says. “It’s impossible to deal with the people here any other way. The people here are depraved; without me they’d all have died of hunger, however many there are. I say again, the people here are thieves, whatever they see, they filch, there’s no manliness in them. And again take this, that he’s a drunkard; give him money, he’ll bring it to the pot-house and sit there naked, not a stitch left, he goes home stripped. Again, too, he’s a scoundrel: he’ll sit on a stone facing the pot-house and start wailing: ‘Mother, dear, why did you give birth to me, bitter drunkard that I am? It would be better if you’d smothered me, bitter drunkard that I am, at birth!’ Is this a man? This is a beast, not a man; he should be eddicated first of all and then be given money. I know when to give it to him.”
So Maxim Ivanovich spoke about the people of Afimyevsk; though it was bad what he said, all the same it was the truth: they were slack, unsteady folk.
There lived in that same town another merchant, and he died; he was a young and light-minded man, he went broke and lost all his capital. During the last year he struggled like a fish on dry land, but his life had come full term. He had been on bad terms with Maxim Ivanovich all the time, and remained roundly in debt to him. In his last hour he still cursed Maxim Ivanovich. And he left behind a widow, still young, and five children with her. And to be left a solitary widow after your husband is like being a swallow without a nest—no small ordeal, the more so with five little ones and nothing to feed them: their last property, a wooden house, Maxim Ivanovich was taking for debt. And so she lined them all up in a row by the church porch; the eldest was a boy of eight, the rest were all girls with a year’s difference between them, each one smaller than the next; the eldest was four and the youngest was still nursing in her mother’s arms. The liturgy was over, Maxim Ivanovich came out, and all the children knelt before him in a row—she had taught them beforehand—and they pressed their little palms together in front of them all as one, and she herself behind them, with the fifth child in her arms, bowed down to the ground before him in front of all the people: “Dear father, Maxim Ivanovich, have mercy on the orphans, don’t take our last crust of bread, don’t drive us out of our own nest!” And everybody there waxed tearful—she had taught them so well. She thought, “He’ll take pride in front of the people, and forgive us, and give the house back to the orphans,” only it didn’t turn out that way. Maxim Ivanovich stopped: “You’re a young widow,” he said, “you want a husband, it’s not the orphans you’re weeping about. And the deceased man cursed me on his deathbed.” And he walked on and didn’t give them back the house. “Why be indigent” (that is, indulgent) “of their foolishness? I’ll do them a good turn, and they’ll berate me still more; nothing will be accomplished, except that a great rumor will spread.” And there was, in fact, a rumor that he had sent to this widow when she was still a young girl, ten years before, and offered her a large sum (she was very beautiful), forgetting that this sin was the same as desecrating God’s church; but he hadn’t succeeded then. And he did not a few such abominations, in town and even all over the province, and on this occasion even lost all measure.
The mother and her fledglings howled when he drove them orphaned from the house, and not only out of wickedness, but like a man who sometimes doesn’t know himself what makes him stand his ground. Well, people helped her at first, and then she went to look for work. Only what kind of work was there, except for the factory? She’d wash the floors here, weed the vegetable patch there, stoke the stove in a bathhouse, all with the baby in her arms, and start wailing, while the other four ran around outside in nothing but their shirts. When she made them kneel by the church porch, they still had some sort of shoes and some sort of coats, because anyhow they were a merchant’s children; now they ran around barefoot: clothes burn up on children, that’s a known fact. Well, what is that to children? As long as the sun shines, they rejoice, they don’t sense their ruin, they’re like little birds, their voices are like little bells. The widow thinks, “Winter will come, and what am I going to do with you? If only God would take care of you by then!” Only she didn’t have to wait till winter. There’s a children’s disease in our parts, the whooping cough, that goes from one to another. First of all the nursing girl died, after her the rest fell ill, and that same autumn all four girls, one after the other, were carried off. True, one was run over by horses in the street. And what do you think? She buried them and started wailing; she had cursed them before, but once God took them, she was sorry. A mother’s heart!
The only one left alive to her was the oldest boy, and she doted on him, trembled over him. He was weak and delicate, and had a pretty face like a girl’s. And she took him to the factory, to his godfather, who was a manager, and got herself hired in the official’s family as a nanny. One day the boy was running in the yard, and here suddenly Maxim Ivanovich came driving up with a pair, and just then he was tipsy; and the boy ran down the stairs straight at him, slipped accidentally, and bumped straight into him as he was getting out of his droshky, punching him in the belly with both hands. He seized the boy by the hair: “Whose boy is he? The birch! Whip him right now, in front of me!” he yelled. The boy went numb, they started thrashing him, he screamed. “So you scream, too? Whip him till he stops screaming!” Maybe they whipped him a lot, maybe not, but he didn’t stop screaming till he looked quite dead. Then they left off whipping him, they got frightened, the boy wasn’t breathing, he lay there unconscious. Later they said they hadn’t whipped him much, but he was very fearful. Maxim Ivanovich also got frightened. “Whose boy is he?” he asked; they told him. “Really now! Take him to his mother. Why was he loitering around the factory?” For two days afterwards he said nothing and then asked again, “How’s the boy?” And things were bad with the boy: he was sick, lying in his mother’s corner, she left her job at the official’s because of it, and he had an inflammation in his lungs. “Really now!” he said. “And why do you think that is? It’s not that they whipped him painfully: they just gave him a little treatment. I’ve ordered the same kind of beatings for others; it went over without any such nonsense.” He expected the mother to go and make a complaint, and, being proud, said nothing; only how could she, the mother didn’t dare to make a complaint. And then he sent her fifteen roubles and
