The Best Short Stories of Fyodor Dostoevsky Page 12

  “Three hundred … three hundred …” he was whispering. “Eleven … twelve … thirteen …” he went on counting “Sixteen—five years! Suppose it’s at four per cent—that’ll make twelve, five times twelve is sixty, and the interest on the sixty … well, say, in five years it’ll be four hundred. Yes, that’s it! … But, good Lord, he won’t invest it at four per cent, not that blackguard! More likely at eight or ten per cent. Well, then, say, five hundred, yes, five hundred thousand at least, that’s certain. Of course, there may be something over for her trousseau … h’m …”

  He stopped meditating, blew his nose and was about to go out of the room when his glance suddenly fell on the little girl and he stopped dead. He did not see me behind the pots of greenery. He appeared to me to be in a state of great agitation. Whether it was the sum he had been doing that had so wrought upon his imagination, or whether it was something else, I could not tell, but he kept rubbing his hands and could not stand still for a moment. This excitement increased to nec plus ultra when he stopped and threw another determined glance on the future heiress. He was about to walk up to her, but first threw a furtive look round the room. Then he began approaching the child on tiptoe as though feeling guilty of something. He went up to her with a little insinuating smile and kissed her on the head. The little girl, not expecting this attack, uttered a frightened cry.

  “And what are you doing here, my sweet child?” he asked in a whisper, throwing another furtive look round him and patting the little girl’s cheek.

  “We’re playing.…”

  “Oh? With him?” Julian Mastakovich looked askance at the little boy. “Run away to the ballroom, there’s a good boy,” he said to him.

  The boy stared at him, but made no answer. Julian Mastakovich again looked around furtively and again bent down to the little girl.

  “What have you got there, my sweet child?” he asked. “A dolly?”

  “A dolly,” the little girl answered, frowning and a little frightened.

  “A dolly.… And do you know, my sweet child, what your dolly is made of?”

  “No, sir,” the girl replied in a whisper, hanging her head.

  “Why, it’s made of rags, darling,” and looking sternly at the little boy, Julian Mastakovich added, “Go to your playmates in the ballroom, boy!”

  The boy and girl frowned and clutched at each other. They did not want to be separated.

  “And do you know why they gave you that doll?” asked Julian Mastakovich, lowering his voice more and more.

  “No, sir.”

  “Because you’ve been a sweet and well-behaved child all the week.”

  Julian Mastakovich, now in a ferment of excitement, threw a careful glance round the room, and lowering his voice more and more, asked in a scarcely audible whisper, his voice broken with emotion and impatience—

  “And do you promise to love me, my little darling, when I come and see your mummy and daddy?”

  Saying this, Julian Mastakovich tried once more to kiss “the little darling,” but the red-haired boy, seeing that she was on the point of bursting into tears, seized her hand and began to whimper from sympathy with her. Julian Mastakovich got angry in good earnest.

  “Go away, go away from here!” he said to the boy. “Go on, go to your playmates in the ballroom!”

  “No, no,” cried the little girl. “You go away! Leave him alone, leave him alone, will you?” she said, almost in tears.

  Someone made a noise at the door. Julian Mastakovich took fright and drew himself up majestically to his full height. But the red-haired boy, who was even more frightened than Julian Mastakovich, abandoned the girl and, keeping close to the wall, slunk out of the drawing-room into the dining-room. To avoid suspicion, Julian Mastakovich, too, went into the dining-room. He was red as a lobster, and, glancing into the looking-glass, seemed to be ashamed of himself. I expect he was sorry for his excitement and impatience. It was of course possible that he was so taken aback at the very beginning by the sum he was doing on his fingers, that he was so tempted and inspired by it, that in spite of all his importance and dignity he had decided to act like a hot-headed youth and take the object of his desires by storm, without reflecting that the object of his desires could not become a real object for at least another five years. I followed the worthy gentleman into the dining-room and there I beheld a strange sight. Julian Mastakovich, flushed with vexation and anger, was bullying the red-haired boy, who, retreating further and further from him, did not know where to run in his terror.

  “Go away, you beastly little beggar, go away! What are you doing here? Stealing fruit, are you? Stealing fruit, eh? Off with you, you naughty boy! Get out, you snivelling little idiot! Away to your playmates! Go!”

  The terrified little boy, in a frantic effort to escape his pursuer, tried to crawl under the table. But Julian Mastakovich, beside himself with fury, took out his large cambric handkerchief and started lashing out with it viciously in an attempt to force the child, who had grown as quiet as a mouse, to come out from under the table. It should be recorded here that Julian Mastakovich was somewhat corpulent. He was a sleek, ruddy-cheeked, solidly built, paunchy man, with fat thighs, in a word, strong as a horse, as they say, and round as a nut. He was perspiring, panting, and getting terribly red in the face. At last he got almost mad with rage, so great was his indignation and perhaps—who knows?—jealousy. I burst out laughing. Julian Mastakovich turned round and, in spite of all his self-importance, was thrown into utter confusion. At that moment our host walked in from the opposite door. The young lad crawled out from under the table and wiped his elbows and knees. Julian Mastakovich hastened to put the handkerchief, which he was holding by one end, to his nose.

  Our host regarded the three of us with a somewhat puzzled expression; but as a man of experience who took a serious view of life, he immediately availed himself of the opportunity of catching his visitor by himself.

  “This is the boy, sir,” he said, pointing at the red-haired boy, “I spoke to you about …”

  “I beg your pardon,” said Julian Mastakovich who had not entirely recovered himself.

  “The son of my children’s governess, sir,” our host went on in the tone of a man asking for a favour. “She’s a woman in rather poor circumstances, sir, the widow of a very honest civil servant, and that’s why I thought you might …”

  “No, no, no,” Julian Mastakovich cried quickly. “I’m sorry, sir, but it’s quite out of the question. I’ve made inquiries and there is no vacancy, and even if there had been one, there are a dozen candidates waiting for it who have a better claim than he. Sorry, sir. Very sorry.”

  “A pity,” said our host, “he’s such a quiet, inoffensive little boy.”

  “A very mischievous boy, sir, from what I’ve seen of him,” replied Julian Mastakovich with a convulsive twist of his lips. “Get along, boy! What are you waiting for? Go and join your playmates!” he said, addressing the boy.

  Here it seemed he could not keep it up any longer and glanced at me out of the corner of one eye. I, too, was not able to keep it up and laughed straight in his face. Julian Mastakovich at once turned away and asked our host in a voice loud enough for me to hear who that strange young man was. They began to exchange whispered confidences and left the room. Afterwards I saw Julian Mastakovich shaking his head incredulously as he listened to our host.

  Having laughed to my heart’s content, I returned to the ballroom. There the great man, surrounded by fathers and mothers, including our host and hostess, was holding forth very warmly about something to a lady he had just been introduced to. The lady was holding by the hand the little girl with whom Julian Mastakovich had had the scene in the drawing-room about ten minutes before. Now he waxed ecstatic in his praises of the beauty, talents, grace, and good breeding of the sweet child. He quite undisguisedly grovelled before the mother, who listened to him almost with tears of rapture. The father’s lips were smiling. Our host was delighted at these manifestations of univer
sal joy. Even the guests were deeply sympathetic; even the children were told to stop playing so as not to interfere with the conversation; the air itself was charged with reverence. I heard afterwards how the dear mother of the charming little girl, touched to the bottom of her heart, begged Julian Mastakovich to be so kind as to honour her house with the presence of his inestimable person; how Julian Mastakovich accepted her invitation with unfeigned enthusiasm; and how later on the guests, going their several ways as demanded by the rules of propriety and decorum, vied with each other in paying the most touching compliments to the contractor, the contractor’s wife, the little girl, and, last but not least, Julian Mastakovich.

  “Is that gentleman married?” I asked in a rather loud voice of one of my acquaintances who was standing nearest to Julian Mastakovich.

  Julian Mastakovich threw a vindictive and searching glance at me.

  “No,” replied my acquaintance, shocked by my breach of good manners, a breach which, I must say, I had committed deliberately.

  —–

  As I was passing a certain church a few days ago, I was surprised to see a large crowd and a great number of carriages in front of it. Everyone around me was talking about a wedding. The day was cloudy; it was beginning to sleet. I followed the crowd into the church and there I saw the bridegroom. He was a small, rotund, sleek, paunchy little man, highly adorned. He never sat still, was in every part of the church at once, attending to everything and issuing orders. At last a rumour passed through the crowd that the bride had arrived. I pushed my way through the people and saw an extraordinarily beautiful girl for whom the spring-tide of life had scarcely begun. But the beautiful girl was sad and pale. She looked about her without interest; I even fancied that her eyes were red with recent tears. The classic severity of every feature of her face added a touch of solemn dignity to her beauty. And through this severity and dignity, through this sadness, a faint glimmer of the first innocent bloom of childhood could still be caught. The sensation I got was of something incredibly naïve, of something that had not yet had time to set, of something young and fresh, and—of something, too, that seemed to be mutely beseeching for mercy.

  People were saying that she was only just sixteen. Looking closely at the bridegroom, I recognised in a flash Julian Mastakovich. I looked at her. Dear God!…

  I began to make my way quickly to the door. In the crowd they were saying that the bride was an heiress, that her dowry was worth five hundred thousand, not to mention the thousands that must have been spent on her trousseau.…

  “He got his sum right, by Jove,” I thought as I elbowed my way into the street.

  THE PEASANT MAREY

  It was Easter Monday. The air was warm, the sky blue, the sun high, “warm” and bright, but I was plunged in gloom. I wandered aimlessly behind the barracks in the prison yard, looked at the palings of the strong prison fence, counting them mechanically, though I did not particularly want to count them, but doing it more out of habit than anything else. It was the second day of “holidays” in prison. The convicts were not taken out to work, lots of them were drunk, cursing and quarrelling broke out every minute in different corners of the prison. Disgusting, coarse songs; groups of convicts playing cards under the bunks; several convicts who had run amok and had been dealt with summarily by their own comrades, were lying half dead on the bunks, covered with sheepskins, until they should recover consciousness; the knives that had already been drawn several times—all this had so harrowing an effect on me during the two days of holidays that it made me ill. I could never bear without disgust the wild orgies of the common people, and here in this place this was specially true. On such days even the officials never looked into the prison, carried out no searches, did not look for drinks, realising that once a year even these outcasts had to be given a chance of enjoying themselves and that otherwise things would be much worse. At last blind fury blazed up in my heart. I met the Pole, M—ski,* one of the political prisoners. He gave me a black look, with flashing eyes and trembling lips. “Je hais ces brigands!” he hissed at me in an undertone and walked past me. I went back to the barracks, although I had rushed out of them like a madman only a quarter of an hour before, when six strong peasants had hurled themselves on the drunken Tartar Gazin in an attempt to quieten him and had begun beating him. They beat him senselessly—a camel might have been killed by such blows. But they knew that it was not easy to kill this Hercules, and they beat him therefore without any qualms. Now, on my return, I noticed Gazin lying unconscious and without any sign of life on a bunk in a corner at the other end of the barracks; he lay covered with a sheepskin, and they all passed by him in silence, knowing very well that if the man was unlucky he might die from a beating like that. I made my way to my place opposite the window with the iron bars and lay on my back with my eyes closed and my hands behind my head. I liked to lie like that: no one would bother a sleeping man, and meanwhile one could dream and think. But I found it difficult to dream: my heart was beating uneasily and M—ski’s words were still echoing in my ears: “Je hais ces brigands!” However, why dwell on these scenes; I sometimes even now dream of those times at night, and none of my dreams is more agonising. Perhaps it will be noticed that to this day I have hardly ever spoken in print of my life in prison; The House of the Dead I wrote fifteen years ago in the person of a fictitious character who was supposed to have killed his wife. I may add, incidentally, just as an interesting detail, that many people have thought and have been maintaining ever since the publication of that book of mine, that I was sent to Siberia for the murder of my wife.

  By and by I did forget my surroundings and became imperceptibly lost in memories. During the four years of my imprisonment I was continually recalling my past and seemed in my memories to live my former life all over again. These memories cropped up by themselves; I seldom evoked them consciously. It would begin from some point, some imperceptible feature, which then grew little by little into a complete picture, into some clear-cut and vivid impression. I used to analyse those impressions, adding new touches to an event that had happened long ago, and, above all, correcting it, correcting it incessantly, and that constituted my chief amusement. This time I for some reason suddenly remembered one fleeting instant in my early childhood when I was only nine years old—an instant that I seemed to have completely forgotten; but at that time I was particularly fond of memories of my early childhood. I remembered an August day in our village; a dry, bright day, though rather cold and windy; summer was drawing to a close, and we should soon have to leave for Moscow and again have to spend all winter over the boring French lessons, and I was so sorry to leave the country. I walked past the threshing floors and, going down a ravine, climbed up into the dense thicket of bushes which stretched from the other side of the ravine to the wood. I got amongst the bushes, and I could hear not very far away, about thirty yards perhaps, a peasant ploughing by himself on a clearing. I knew he was ploughing up the steep slope of a hill. The horse must have found it very hard going, for from time to time I heard the peasant’s call from a distance: “Gee up! Gee up!” I knew almost all our peasants, but I did not know which of them was ploughing now, nor did it really matter to me who it was because I was occupied with my own affairs—I too was busy, breaking off a switch from a hazel-tree to strike frogs with; hazel twigs are very lovely, but they are also very brittle, much more brittle than birch twigs. I was also interested in beetles and other insects, and I was collecting them; some of them were very beautiful. I also liked the small quick red and yellow lizards with black spots, but I was afraid of snakes. However, there were many fewer snakes than lizards. There were not many mushrooms there; to get mushrooms one had to go to the birch wood, and I was about to go there. And there was nothing in the world I loved so much as the wood with its mushrooms and wild berries, its beetles and its birds, its hedgehogs and squirrels, and its damp smell of rotted leaves. And even as I write this I can smell the fragrance of our birch wood: these impressions remain with
you for your whole life. Suddenly amid the dead silence I heard clearly and distinctly the shout, “Wolf! Wolf!” I uttered a shriek and, panic-stricken, screamed at the top of my voice and rushed out to the clearing straight to the ploughing peasant.

  It was our peasant Marey. I do not know if there is such a name, but everybody called him Marey. He was a peasant of about fifty, thick-set and over medium height, with a large, grizzled, dark-brown beard. I knew him, but till that day I had scarcely ever spoken to him. When he heard my cry, he even stopped his old mare, and when, unable to stop myself I clutched at his wooden plough with one hand and at his sleeve with the other, he saw how terrified I was.

  “There’s a wolf there!” I cried, breathless.

  He threw up his head and looked round involuntarily, for a moment almost believing me.

  “Where’s the wolf?”

  “Someone shouted—shouted just now ‘Wolf! Wolf!’ ” I stammered.

  “There, there! There are no wolves hereabouts,” he murmured, trying to calm me. “You’ve been dreaming, sonny. Who ever heard of wolves in these parts?”

  But I was trembling all over and I was still clutching at his smock, and I suppose I must have been very pale. He looked at me with a worried smile, evidently anxious and troubled about me.

  “Dear, dear, how frightened you are,” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t be frightened, sonny. Oh, you poor thing, you! There, there.”

  He stretched out his hand and suddenly stroked my cheek.

  “There now! Christ be with you, cross yourself, there’s a good lad!”