He was from Smolensk, and had come to seek work, hoping to be able to buy grain and pay his taxes. ‘There is no work to be got,’ said he. ‘The soldiers2 have taken all the work. So I am knocking about, and God knows I have not eaten for two days!’ He spoke timidly, with an attempt at a smile. A seller of hot drinks,3 an old soldier, was standing near and I called him. He poured out a glass. The peasant took it in his hands and, trying not to lose any of the heat, warmed them with it before drinking. While doing so he told me his adventures (the adventures, or the stories of them told by these men, were almost all alike).
He had had a little work but it came to an end; and then his purse with his passport and what money he had had been stolen here in the Night-Lodging-House. Now he could not get away from Moscow. He said that during the day he warmed himself in the drink-shops and ate scraps of bread which were sometimes given to him; but sometimes they drove him out. He got his night’s lodging free in Lyapin House. He was now only waiting for a police-search, when he would be put in prison for having no passport, and sent by etapeA to his native place. ‘They say there will be a police search on Thursday,’ added he. (Prison and the etape were to him like the Promised Land.)
While he was telling me this two or three others among the crowd confirmed his words and said they were in the same plight. A lean youth, pale, long-nosed, with nothing over his shirt (which was torn at the shoulder) and with a peakless cap, pushed his way
1 Fourteen degrees above zero Fahrenheit.-A. M.
2 Soldiers were often hired out to work at cheap rates.-A. M.
3 sbiten, made with honey and spices.-A. M.
4 On foot, with others, under escort.-A. M.
sidelong to me through the crowd. He was shivering violently all the time, but tried to smile contemptuously at the peasant’s speech, thinking thereby to adapt himself to my tone, and he looked me in the face. I offered him, too, some sbiten. On taking the glass he also warmed his hands on it, but he had only begun to speak when he was shoved aside by a big, black, aquiline-nosed fellow in a print shirt and a waistcoat but no cap. The aquiline-nosed man asked for some sbiten. Then followed a tall, drunken old man with a pointed beard, in an overcoat tied round the waist with a cord, and wearing bast-shoes. Then came a little fellow with a swollen face and watery eyes, in a brown nankeen pea-jacket, with bare knees showing through the holes in his summer trousers and knocking together from cold.
He shivered so that he could not hold the glass but spilled it over himself. The others began to abuse him, but he only smiled pitifully and shivered. Then came a crooked, deformed man in tatters, and with strips of linen tied round his bare feet; then something that looked like an officer, then something that looked like a cleric, then something strange and noseless: all, hungry, cold, importunate and submissive, crowded round me and pressed near the sbiten till it was all finished. One man asked for money and I gave him some.
Another asked, and a third, and then the crowd besieged me. Disorder and a crush ensued. A porter from the next house shouted to them to get off the pavement in front of his house and they submissively obeyed his command. Organizers appeared among the crowd, who took me under their protection. They wished to extricate me from the crush; but the crowd that had at first stretched along the pavement had now become disorganized and gathered round me.
They all looked at me and begged; and each face was more pitiful, more jaded, and more degraded than, the last. I gave away all I had with me, which was not much, only some twenty rubles (£2), and following the crowd I entered the Night-Lodging-House. It was an immense building consisting of four departments. On the top stories were the men’s lodgings and on the lower stories the women’s. First I entered the latter: a large room all filled with bunks like the berths in third-class Russian railway cars. They were arranged in two tiers, above and below. Women old and young strange, tattered, with no outdoor garments entered and took possession of their bunks: some below and some above. Some of the older ones crossed themselves and prayed for the founder of this refuge.
Others laughed and swore. I went upstairs. There the men were taking their places. Among them I saw one of those to whom I had given money. On seeing him I suddenly felt dreadfully ashamed and hurried away. Arid feeling as if I had committed a crime, I left the house and went home. There, ascending the carpeted steps to the cloth-carpeted hall and taking off my fur coat, I sat down to a five-course dinner, served by two lackeys in dress clothes with white ties and white gloves.
Thirty years ago in Paris I once saw how, in the presence of thousands of spectators, they cut a man’s head off with a guillotine. I knew that the man was a dreadful criminal; I knew all the arguments that have been written in defence of that kind of action, and I knew it was done deliberately and intentionally, but at the moment the head and body separated and fell into the box I gasped, and realized not with my mind nor with my heart but with my whole being, that all the arguments in defence of capital punishment are wicked nonsense, and that however many people may combine to commit murder-the worst of all crimes-and whatever they may call themselves, murder remains murder, and that this crime had been committed before my eyes, and I by my presence and nonintervention had approved and shared in it.
In the same way now, at the sight of the hunger, cold, and degradation of thousands of people, I understood not with my mind or my heart but with my whole being; that the existence of tens of thousands of such people in Moscow-while I and thousands of others over-eat ourselves with beef-steaks and sturgeon and cover our horses and floors with cloth or carpets-no matter what all the learned men in the world may say about its necessity-is a crime, not committed once but constantly; and that I with my luxury not merely tolerate it but share in it. For me the difference between these two impressions was only-that there all I could have done would have been to cry out to the murderers, who stood around the guillotine arranging the murder, that they were doing wrong, and to have tried by all means to hinder it.
Even: then I should have known in advance that my action would not prevent the murder. But here I could have given not sbiten alone and the trifling sum of money I had with me, but the overcoat I wore and all I had at home. But I had not done it, and I therefore felt and feel and shall not cease to feel that as long as I have any superfluous food and someone else has none, and I have two coats and someone else has none, I share in a constantly repeated crime.
CHAPTER III
THAT same evening after returning from Lyapin House I told my impressions to a friend. He, a town dweller, began to explain with some satisfaction that it was the most natural thing in a city, and that it was merely my provincialism that caused me to see anything particular in it. Things had always been so and would and must always be so; it is an inevitable condition of civilization. In London it is still worse . . . so there is nothing bad in it and one ought not to be dissatisfied with it. I began to answer my friend; but I did it so warmly and irritably that my wife ran in from an adjoining room to ask what had happened.
It seems that, without noticing it, I had cried out with tears in my voice and had waved my arms at my friend, exclaiming: ‘One cannot live so; one cannot; one cannot!’ They put me to shame for my unnecessary ardour, and told me that I cannot talk quietly about anything but become unpleasantly excited, and in particular they proved to me that the existence of such unfortunate people cannot justify my spoiling the lives of those about me.
I felt that this was quite just, and I was silenced; but in the depth of my heart I felt that I too was right, and I could not feel at ease.
Town life, which had seemed strange and foreign to me before, now became so repulsive that all the pleasures of the luxurious life I formerly enjoyed became a torment to me.
