1 In Russian peasant huts the brick stove is built so as to heat the hut and to serve as an oven, and its flat top furnishes a warm and convenient place to sleep on.-A. M.
people it is far from being as easy to understand his sin as it is for a peasant who makes his neighbour heat his stove.
It is terribly hard for people who are on the upper rungs of that ladder to understand what is demanded of them. Their heads are made dizzy by the height of the ladder of lies they stand on, when they see the place below to which they must descend in order to live their life not entirely well but even not quite inhumanly; and therefore this simple and clear truth seems strange to them.
For a man with ten servants, liveries, coachmen, a chef, pictures, and pianos, it certainly seems strange and even ridiculous to do what is the simplest and first action of anyone who is, I will not say a good man but merely a man and not an animal: himself to chop the wood with which his food is cooked and with which he is warmed; himself to clean the boots and goloshes with which he has carelessly stepped into some dirt; himself to bring the water with which he keeps himself clean, and carry out the dirty water in which he has washed.
But besides the remoteness of people from the truth, there is another cause which keeps them from seeing that it is obligatory for them to undertake the simplest and most natural physical work: this is the complexity of the circumstances and inter-connected interests of those among whom a rich man lives.
This morning I went out into the corridor where the stoves are lighted. A peasant was heating the stove that warms my son’s room. I went into his room; he was still asleep. It was eleven o’clock. To-day is a holiday; and so excuses-there are no lessons.
A plump eighteen-year-old lad with a beard, who has eaten much the evening before, sleeps till eleven o’clock. But a peasant of his own age has got up in the morning, has already done a lot of things and is heating the tenth stove, while my son sleeps. ‘Better let the peasant not heat the stove to warm that sleek lazy body!’ thought 1. But at once I remembered that this stove warms also the housekeeper’s room, who is a woman of forty and till three in the morning prepared everything for the supper my son ate, and then put away the dishes, but who still got up at seven. She could not heat the stove for herself, she would not have time. The peasant was heating for her also, and on her account the lazy fellow gets warmed.
It is true that the interests of all are interwoven, but with no prolonged reckoning each man’s conscience tells him on whose side is the labour and on whose the idleness. And not only does conscience tell it, it is told most clearly of all by his account-book. The more money anyone spends the more he obliges others to work for him; the less he spends the more he works.
But industry, public works, and finally that most terrible of words: culture-the development of science and art?
CHAPTER XXIV
LAST year,1 in March, I was returning home late one evening. Turning from Zubov street to Khamovniki side-street I saw some black spots on the snow of the Virgin’s Field. Something was moving there. I should not have paid attention to it if a policeman standing at the entrance to the side-street had not shouted in the direction of the black spots:
‘Vasili! Why don’t you bring her?’
‘She won’t come!’ replied a voice from there, and after that the black spots moved towards the policeman.
I stopped and asked him what it was. He said: ‘They have arrested the wenches at the Rzhanov House and taken them to the police-station. This one lagged behind, you see she won’t move.’
A yard-porter in a sheepskin coat was fetching her. She walked in front and he kept pushing her from behind. We, the porter, the policeman, and I, were all wearing winter things, but she had only her dress on. In the dusk I could only make out a brown dress, and a kerchief on her head and neck. She was short, as starvelings are, with short legs and a disproportionately broad ill shaped figure.
‘Now, carrion, we’re waiting for you. Get along, I say! I’ll give it you!’ shouted the policeman. It was plain he was tired and had lost patience with her. She went a few steps and again stopped. The elderly yard-porter, a good-natured fellow (I know him personally), pulled her by the arm:
‘There, I’ll teach you to stop! Go on!’ he said, pretending to be angry. She staggered and began to speak in a grating voice. Every sound she uttered was a false note, hoarse and squeaking.
‘Now then! What are you shoving for? I’ll get there!’ ‘You’ll freeze,’ said the porter. ‘Our kind don’t freeze. I’m a hot ‘un.’
She meant it as a jest but it sounded like abuse. Near the lamp-post that stands not far from the gate of our house she again stopped and leant almost fell-against the wooden fence of the yard, and began fumbling in her skirts with clumsy benumbed fingers. They again shouted at her, but she only muttered and went on with what she was doing. In one hand she held a cigarette bent like an are, and in the other some sulphur matches. I stopped, ashamed to go past her though also ashamed to stand and look on. At last I made up my mind and went up to her. She leant with her shoulder against the wooden fence, and vainly trying to strike the sulphur matches against it threw them away. I looked at her face. She was a starveling, but it seemed to me no longer young. I supposed her to be about thirty. She had a dirty-coloured face, small, dim, and drunken eyes, a knob-shaped nose, crooked slobbering lips that turned down at the corners, and a short strand of dry hair showed from under her kerchief. Her figure was long and flat and her hands and feet
1 That is, in 1884.
stumpy. I stopped opposite her. She looked at me and smirked, as if to say she knew what I was thinking about.
I felt I had to say something to her, and I wished to show her that I pitied her. ‘Are your parents alive?’ I asked.
She laughed hoarsely, then suddenly stopped and, raising her brows, looked at me. ‘Are your parents alive?’ I repeated.
She smirked with an expression which seemed to say: ‘You have found a queer thing to ask about!’
‘I have a mother,’ she said. ‘What is it to you?’ ‘And how old are you?’
‘Over fifteen,’ said she, promptly answering a question she was evidently accustomed to.
‘Now, get on! We shall freeze to death with you here, blast you!’ shouted the policeman, and she staggered away from the fence and swaying to and fro went down Khamovniki street to the police-station, while I turned in at the gate, entered the house, and asked if my daughters had come home. I was told that they had been to a party, had enjoyed themselves very much, had returned, and were already asleep.
Next morning I wanted to go to the police-station to learn what they had done with this unfortunate woman, and I was setting out rather early, when one of those gentry1 whose weaknesses have caused them to fall from the comfortable life to which they are accustomed and who are now up and now down again, came to see me. I had known this one three years. During that time he had several times pawned everything he had, even to the clothes he was wearing. Such a misfortune had happened to him quite recently, and now he was spending his nights in one of the night-lodgings at Rzhanov House and coming to me in the daytime. He met me as I was going out and, without listening to what I wanted to say, at once began to tell me what had happened at Rzhanov House that night. Before he had half finished the story he, an old man who had seen all phases of life, burst into sobs, began to cry, and turned to the wall. This is what he told me. All he said was perfectly true. I afterwards verified it on the spot, and learnt additional details which I will add to his story.
In that doss-lodging on the ground floor, in Number 32 where my friend slept, among various transient night-lodgers, men and women who came together for five kopeks, there lived a washerwoman of about thirty years old, a blond woman, quiet and well-conducted but sickly. The landlady of the tenement is a boatman’s mistress. In summer her lover keeps a boat, but in winter they make a living by letting bunks for the night, at three kopeks without a pillow or five kopeks with a pillow. The washerwoman had lived there for some months and was a quiet woman;
