The day after Mr. Benevolensky’s arrival, at tea, Tatyana Borisovna told her nephew to show the visitor his drawings. “So he draws, does he?” said Mr. Benevolensky in some surprise, and he turned to little Andrei with interest. “Certainly, he does,” rejoined Tatyana Borisovna. “He’s so keen! and all on his own too, without any teacher.” “Oh, show me, show me,” repeated Mr. Benevolensky. Blushing and smiling, Andrei produced his sketch-book for the visitor. Mr. Benevolensky began to turn over the pages with the air of a connoisseur. “Well done, young man,” he pronounced at last. “Very well done,” and he stroked Andrei’s head. Andrei kissed his hand in mid-air. “There’s talent for you! I congratulate you, Tatyana Borisovna, I do indeed.” “You know, Pyotr Mikhailich, I can’t find him a teacher here. To get one from the town is expensive, my neighbors the Artamonovs have a painter, an excellent one, I understand, but the lady of the house forbids him to give lessons outside, she says it will spoil his taste.” “Hmm, hmm,” pronounced Mr. Benevolensky; he reflected, and gave a sidelong look at Andrei. “Well, we’ll talk it over,” he added suddenly, and rubbed his hands. The same day he asked Tatyana Borisovna if he could speak with her alone. They were closeted together. Half an hour later they called for little Andrei. Little Andrei went in. Mr. Benevolensky was standing in the window, slightly flushed, and radiant-eyed. Tatyana Borisovna was sitting in a corner drying her tears. “Well, little Andrei,” she began at length, “say thank you to Pyotr Mikhailich: he is going to take you under his guardianship and carry you off to Petersburg.” Andrei was fairly rooted to the spot. “Tell me honestly,” began Mr. Benevolensky in a voice of dignity and condescension. “Do you want to be an artist, young man, do you feel a holy vocation to art?” “Yes, I want to be an artist, Pyotr Mikhailich,” rejoined little Andrei tremulously. “Well then, I am very glad. You will, of course,” continued Mr. Benevolensky, “find it painful to leave your revered aunt; you should feel the liveliest gratitude towards her.” “I adore my aunt,” Andrei interrupted him, and began to blink. “Of course, of course, that’s very understandable and does you much credit; all the same, imagine what joy when you succeed. . . .” “Kiss me, Andrei,” whispered the good lady. Little Andrei threw himself on her neck. “Well, now say thank you to your benefactor . . .” Little Andrei put his arms round Mr. Benevolensky’s stomach, stood up on tiptoes, and managed to reach his hand, which the benefactor permitted, certainly, but without any undue enthusiasm. . . . After all, he must console and gratify the child, well, yes, and also pander to his own vanity a bit. Two days later Mr. Benevolensky departed, taking with him his new charge.
During the first three years of his absence, little Andrei wrote fairly often and sometimes appended drawings to his letters. Occasionally Mr. Benevolensky added a few words from himself, approbatory for the most part; then the letters got fewer, and finally broke off altogether. For a whole year there was no word from the nephew; Tatyana Borisovna was beginning to grow anxious, when suddenly she received a note of the following tenor: “Dear Aunt, three days ago my protector, Pyotr Mikhailich, passed away. A cruel paralytic stroke bereft me of this last support. Of course, I am already nineteen; in the last seven years I have made considerable progress; I have great hope of my talent, and can live by it; I am not despondent, but all the same, if you can, send me by the first opportunity 250 rubles in notes. I kiss your hand and remain, etc.”
Tatyana Borisovna sent off the 250 rubles to her nephew. Two months later he asked for more; she collected what she could and sent it off. Six weeks after this second despatch, he asked for money a third time, saying that it was for paints for a portrait ordered from him by Princess Terteresheneva. Tatyana Borisovna refused. In that case, he wrote to her, he intended to come and stay with her in the country in order to restore his health. And so indeed, in May of the same year, Little Andrei returned to Malye Bryki.
At first Tatyana Borisovna did not recognize him. Judging by his letter, she expected a thin, sickly fellow, but what she saw was a sturdy-shouldered lad with a broad, red face and curled, oily hair. Thin, pale little Andrei had turned into a stalwart Andrei Ivanich Belovzorov. It was not only his appearance which had altered. The punctilious timidity, precision, and neatness of previous years had given place to a careless joviality and an unbearable slovenliness; he had a rolling gait, threw himself into armchairs, collapsed over the table, sprawled about, yawned his head off; he was rude to his aunt and to the servants. I, he seemed to say, am an artist, a free Cossack! This is how we are! Sometimes he would not take a brush in his hand for days on end; but when the so-called inspiration overcame him, he would strut about like a man in a daze, heavy-footed, awkward, noisy; his cheeks would blaze with a coarse flush, his eyes would be bleary; he would go off into discourses about his talent, his successes, his development, his progress . . . It appeared in fact that his skill hardly ran to passable portrait-sketches. He was an utter dunce, read nothing, indeed what has an artist to gain by reading! Nature, freedom, poetry—these are his element. All he need do is shake his curls, sing like a nightingale and smoke himself silly with Beetle mixture! The devil-may-care Russian touch is all very well, but it only suits a few; untalented, second-rate exponents of it are unbearable. Our friend Andrei Ivanich settled in at his aunt’s: free food evidently suited his palate. On visitors he inflicted mortal boredom. He would sit down at the piano (for Tatyana Borisovna actually had one) and begin strumming “The Dashing Troika” with one finger; he would strike a chord, hammer away at the keys; for whole hours he would painfully howl his way through Varlamov’s songs: “The Lonely Pinetree” or “No, Doctor, come not,” and all this with his eyes sunk in fat and his cheeks as shiny as a drum. . . . Then suddenly he would roar out: “Die away, ye Throbs of Passion” . . . Tatyana Borisovna would fairly jump out of her skin.
“It’s a strange thing,” she remarked to me one day, “how all the songs written to-day are sort of desperate; in my time they used to write them differently: there were sad songs too, but all the same they were pleasant to listen to. . . . For instance:
Come, come to me in the meadow;
Where I wait for you in vain;
Come, come to me in the meadow
Where I shed tears like the rain.
Alas, when you come to me, I fear
That all too late ’twill be, my dear.
Tatyana Borisovna smiled slyly.
“I su-u-ffer, I su-u-ffer,” bawled her nephew in the next room.
“That’s enough, Andrei.”
“Parting makes the soul despo-o-ond,” continued the irrepressible singer.
Tatyana Borisovna shook her head. “Oh, these artists!”
A year has passed since then. Belovzorov is still living with his aunt and still preparing to move to Petersburg. In the country he has grown as fat as he is tall. His aunt—would you believe it?—dotes on him, and girls of the neighborhood fall in love with him . . .
Many of her former acquaintances have stopped visiting Tatyana Borisovna.
Death
I HAVE A YOUNG NEIGHBOR, A FARMER AND A SPORTSMAN. ONE fine July morning I rode over to see him with the suggestion that we should go out together after blackcock. He agreed. “Only,” he said, “let’s go to my bit of brushwood at Zusha; on the way I’ll have a look at Chapligino; my oak-wood, d’you know? It’s being felled.” “Let’s do that,” I said. He ordered his horse to be saddled, put on a green coat with brass buttons shaped like a boar’s head, a game-bag with a woolwork pattern, and a silver flask, shouldered a new French gun, took a self-satisfied turn in front of the looking-glass, and called to his dog Esperance, which had been given to him by a cousin, an old maid with an excellent heart but without a hair on her head. We set out. My neighbor took with him his constable Arkhip, a stout, thick-set peasant with a square face and the pronounced cheekbones of prehistoric man, also his newly-appointed agent, a youth of nineteen from the Baltic provinces, thin, fair, shortsighted, with sloping shoulders, by name Mr. Gottlieb von d
er Kock. My neighbor himself had only recently come into possession of his property. He had inherited it from an aunt, Mrs. State-Councillor Kardon-Kataeva, an extremely fat woman with a habit of groaning long and plaintively even when in bed. We reached the “brushwood.” “Wait for me here in the clearing,” said Ardalion Mikhailich (my neighbor) to his companions. The German bowed, dismounted, took a book from his pocket, probably a novel by Johanna Schopenhauer, and sat down beneath a bush; Arkhip halted in the sun and never stirred for a whole hour. We made a circle in the bushes without putting anything up. Ardalion informed me that he meant to go on into the wood. Somehow or other, that day, I had no confidence in our luck: I trailed after him. We went back to the clearing. The German marked his page, got up, put his book in his pocket, and, with some difficulty, mounted his sorry, dock-tailed hack, which whined and kicked at the slightest touch; Arkhip gave a start, pulled both reins at the same time, clattered his feet, and finally set his dazed, downtrodden little nag in motion. Off we went.
I had known Ardalion’s wood since my childhood. In company with my French tutor, Monsieur Désiré Fleury, the best-hearted of men (who, incidentally, all but ruined my health by making me drink Leroy’s mixture every night), I often used to go to Chapligino. The whole wood consisted of some two or three hundred huge oaks and ash-trees. Their majestic and mighty trunks stood out superbly in black against the translucent, golden green of the hazels and mountain ashes; higher up, they silhouetted themselves gracefully against the clear blue sky and threw out their spreading, knotty branches to make a tent; hawks, merlins, and kestrels came whistling past below the motionless tree-tops; spotted woodpeckers tapped sharply on the thick bark; the ringing song of the black thrush came suddenly through the thick foliage, following close on the staccato cry of the oriole; below, in the bushes, robins, siskins, and chiffchaffs chirruped and sang. Chaffinches hopped nimbly about the paths; a white hare stole along the edge of the wood, hopping cautiously, as if on crutches; a red-brown squirrel jumped now and then from tree to tree and sat still all of a sudden, with its tail raised above its head. In the grass beside the tall ant-hills, in the faint shade of the finely-carved bracken leaves, violets and lilies-of-the-valley blossomed, and mushrooms of all kinds—yellow and brown, oak-mushrooms and scarlet fly-agaric—grew there; on the turf, between the spreading bushes, was the bright red of the wild strawberry . . . And the shade there was inside the wood! In the sultriest heat, at noon, it was absolute night: stillness, perfume, freshness . . . The times I had spent at Chapligino had been happy, and consequently it was with a sad heart, I confess, that I went into this wood I had known so well. The disastrous snowless winter of 1840 had not spared my old friends, the oaks and ashes; parched, stripped, just covered here and there with unhealthy verdure, they towered sadly up above the young trees, which had been planted instead but would never fill their place . . . * Some of them, still overgrown with leafage at their base, raised dead shattered branches aloft, as if in protest or despair; on others, from foliage that was still fairly thick, though not so abundant or luxuriant as before, protruded stout, dried-up dead boughs; some had already lost all their bark; others had finally fallen right over and lay rotting on the ground like corpses. Who could have foreseen it—that at Chapligino there would be no shade to be found! Well, I thought, as I looked at the dying trees, I suppose it must be shameful for you and bitter? . . . I remembered the lines of Koltsov:
What is there left
Of your lofty eloquence,
Your proud strength,
Your imperial brilliance?
Where is it now,
Your green majesty? . . .
“How comes it, Ardalion,” I began, “that these trees weren’t felled the year after? Why, they won’t fetch a tenth now of what they would have before.”
He merely shrugged his shoulders. “Ask my aunt; the merchants came, brought the money, and pestered her to sell.”
“Mein Gott! Mein Gott!” exclaimed von der Kock at every step. “Petty! Petty!”
“How d’you mean, petty?” remarked my neighbor with a smile.
“That’s to say, vot a petty, vot a shame, that’s vot I meant.”
His compassion was especially aroused by the oaks that lay on the ground—and he was right: any miller would have paid a good price for them. Meanwhile the constable Arkhip preserved an imperturbable calm and showed no sign of grief. On the contrary, it was even with a certain satisfaction that he jumped over them and flicked them with his whip.
We were emerging on to the scene of the felling, when suddenly, immediately after the crash of a falling tree, there was a cry and the sound of voices, and a few minutes later a young peasant, pale and shock-headed, came dashing out of the thicket towards us.
“What’s the matter? Where are you off to?” Ardalion asked him.
He stopped at once.
“Oh, Ardalion Mikhailich, sir, something terrible!”
“What?”
“Maxim’s been caught under a tree.”
“How so? . . . D’you mean Maxim the contractor?”
“Yes, sir. We were felling an ash and he was standing watching. . . . He stood and stood, then off he went to the well to get some water; you see, he was thirsty. Then suddenly the ash comes toppling down just where he is. We shout to him, ‘Run, run, run.’ He ought to have dodged to one side, but he went and ran straight ahead . . . he must have been scared. The ash fairly hid him under its top branches. Why it fell so soon, the Lord alone knows. Maybe its heart was rotten.”
“And it hit Maxim?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Killed him?”
“No, sir, he’s still alive—but then his legs and arms are crushed. I was running to Seliverstich to get a doctor.”
Ardalion ordered the constable to gallop to Seliverstich village, and set off himself at a vigorous trot towards the clearing. . . . I followed him.
We found poor Maxim on the ground. Some half a dozen peasants were standing round him. We dismounted. There was scarcely a groan from him; now and then he opened his eyes wide, looked around as if in astonishment, and bit a bloodless lip. . . . His chin trembled, his hair was plastered to his brow, his chest rose irregularly: he was dying. The gentle shade of a young lime-tree fell peacefully across his face.
We bent over him. He recognized Ardalion.
“Sir,” he began indistinctly, “tell them . . . priest . . . to send . . . the Lord . . . punished me . . . my legs and arms, all broken . . . to-day . . . Sunday . . . and I . . . and I . . . you see . . . I didn’t give the lads the day off.”
He was silent. His breath came with difficulty. “My money . . . give it . . . my wife . . . when my debts are paid . . . Onisim knows what I owe . . . and who to . . .”
“We have sent for the doctor, Maxim,” said my neighbor. “You may live yet.”
He tried to open his eyes, and raised his eyebrows and eyelids with an effort.
“No, I’m dying. . . . Here . . . here it comes, here it is, here . . . Forgive me, lads, for anything . . .”
“God will forgive you, Maxim Andreich,” said the peasants in gruff unison, and they took off their caps. “You forgive us.”
All of a sudden he gave a desperate jerk of his head, and a mournful heave of his chest, then sank back again.
“But it isn’t right for him to die here,” exclaimed Ardalion. “Get the mat out of the cart, lads, and let’s carry him to the infirmary.”
Two men ran off to the cart.
“From Efim . . . at Sychovo . . .” whispered the dying man. “I bought a horse yesterday. . . . I paid a deposit . . . so the horse is mine . . . my wife to have it too. . . .”
They began to move him on to the mat . . . he shuddered all over, like a shot bird, then straightened himself out. . . .
“He’s dead,” murmured the peasants.
We mounted our horses in silence and rode away.
Poor Maxim’s death plunged me in reflection. Strange how death takes the R
ussian peasant! His state of mind at his last hour cannot be called indifference or dull-wittedness; he dies as if he were going through a ceremony: coldly, and with simplicity.
Some years ago, on the land of another neighbor of mine, a peasant was badly burnt in a drying-shed. (Indeed he might have been left there, if a passing townsman hadn’t pulled him out, more dead than alive: he had plunged into a cask of water, then taken a run at the door and broken it in with the roof above it ablaze.) I visited the peasant in his cabin. Inside it was dark, stuffy. I asked where the patient was. “There he is, sir, on the stove-bench,” answered a dejected-looking woman, in a singsong voice. I went across, and found the peasant lying covered with a sheepskin and breathing heavily. “Well, how do you feel?” The sick man fidgeted above the stove, tried to rise, all injured as he was and at the point of death. “Lie down, lie down . . . Well, how are you?” “Pretty bad,” he said. “D’you feel pain?” Silence. “Is there anything you want?” Silence. “Shall I send you some tea, eh?” “I don’t want it.” I left him and sat down on a bench. I sat for a quarter of an hour, half an hour—and, in the cabin, the silence of the tomb. In a corner, at a table under the icons, a little girl of five was hiding and munching bread. Now and then her mother would scold her. In the passage there were comings and goings, knockings, voices: a brother’s wife was chopping a cabbage. “Hey, Axinya!” said the patient at last. “What?” “Give me some kvass.” Axinya gave him some kvass. More silence. I asked in a whisper if he had had communion. “Yes.” Well, then, everything was in order: he was waiting for death and that was all there was to it. I could bear it no longer and left. . . .
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