Poor Folk and Other Stories (36 page)

Meanwhile the dying end of the tallow candle illuminated a scene that would have aroused the inquisitiveness of any onlooker. About a dozen lodgers were grouped around the bed in the most picturesque
garb, all uncombed, unshaved, unwashed and sleepy-eyed, just as they had been on going to bed. Some of them were quite pale, others had sweaty foreheads; some were shivering, while others looked as though they had fever. The landlady, quite stupefied, was standing quietly with her arms folded, awaiting the merciful attentions of Yaroslav Ilyich. From above, atop the stove, the heads of Avdotya the serving-maid and the landlady's favourite cat looked down with frightened curiosity; scattered all around lay the torn and broken screen; the open trunk displayed its ignoble contents; the quilt and pillow, covered with bits of stuffing from the mattress, lay carelessly in a heap; and on the three-legged wooden table the gradually increasing mound of silver and other coins shone and sparkled. Semyon Ivanovich alone preserved his cool-headedness, lay peacefully on the bed and seemed to have no inkling of his impending ruin. Indeed, when the scissors were brought and Yaroslav Ilyich's assistant, wishing to make himself useful, shook the mattress somewhat impatiently, so as the more conveniently to free it from the back of its owner, Semyon Ivanovich, being a polite soul, first made a little room by shifting over on his side with his back to the searchers; then, at a second jolt, he turned on his stomach, and finally made even more room; but since the outermost board of the bedstead was missing on that side, he suddenly plunged headlong to the floor, leaving only two thin, bony, blue legs exposed to view, sticking upright like two branches of a charred tree. Since this was the second time that morning that Mr Prokharchin had popped under his bed, he immediately aroused suspicion, and some of the tenants, led by Zinovy Prokofyevich, crawled underneath it with the intention of finding out whether there was in fact something concealed there, too. But the searchers only succeeded in knocking their heads together fornothing, and since Yaroslav Ilyich shouted to them to extricate Semyon Ivanovich from his undignified position at once, two of the more sensible of them each took hold of one of his legs, hauled the unconventional capitalist out into the light of day and placed him across the bed. Meanwhile hair and cotton mattress stuffing were flying everywhere, the pile of silver was growing – and, gracious! what was there not to be found in it… Noble silver ruble sovereigns, robust and respectable one-and-a-half-ruble crowns, pretty half-ruble coins, plebeian twenty-five- and twenty-copeck pieces, even the unpromising currency of old ladies, silver ten- and five-copeck bits – all done up in the correct paper rolls, in the most
methodical and respectable order. There were collector's items, too: two tokens of some kind; a
napoléon d'or
; a coin whose origins were obscure but which was very rare… Some of the ruble coins were of great antiquity; there were worn and shaven coins from the reign of the Empress Elizabeth, from the days of Peter the Great, from Catherine's reign; there were German kreutzers; there were coins which are nowadays exceedingly rare – old fifteen-copeck pieces which had holes pierced in them so they could be worn in the ears, all rubbed completely smooth, but with the correct number of serrations; there were even coppers, but they were all green and tarnished… They found one red ten-ruble note – but that was all. At last, when the dissection had been performed and when, having shaken the mattress-cover several times, they could find nothing else that clinked, they placed all the money on the table and began to count it. It would have been possible at first sight to be completely deceived, and to make a straight guess at a million – such an enormous pile it was. But it was not a million, though it did prove to be a most considerable sum – two thousand four hundred and ninety seven rubles and fifty copecks, to be precise; and the subvention that had been organized by Zinovy Proko fyevich the day before would have brought this up to a round figure of no more than two and a half thousand. They gathered the money together, placed a seal on the dead man's trunk, heard out the landlady's complaints and told her when and where she should present her testimony with regard to the paltry sum owed to her by the dead man. Signed statements were taken from the proper persons; here the question of the sister-in-law was almost broached; but, having satisfied themselves that the sister-in-law was in a certain sense a myth, being a product of the lack of imagination with which they had more than once reproached the deceased in respect of his documents – they dropped the idea as being useless, likely to cause harm and to bring his, Mr Prokharchin's, good name into disrepute; with this the matter was concluded. When, however, the initial shock had faded, when they had had time to regain their wits and had perceived what manner of man the deceased had been, they all grew quiet and subdued and began to look at one another distrustfully. Some of them took Semyon Ivanovich's action very much to heart, and even seemed to take offence… All that capital! The man hadfairly been putting it away! Never one to lose his presence of mind, Mark Ivanovich started to launch into an explanation of why Semyon
Ivanovich had suddenly become so frightened; but no one listened to him. Zinovy Prokofyevich seemed very preoccupied. Okeanov had a drop or two to drink, the others huddled up together, as it were, and when evening came the littl clerk Kantarev, who was distinguished by his nose, which resembled a sparrow's beak, moved out of the apartment, having thoroughly sealed and tied all his boxes and bundles, coldly explaining to those who were curious that times were hard and that he could not afford to continue lodging there. The landlady howled without cease, wailing and cursing Semyon Ivanovich for having taken advantage of her orphaned state. She asked Mark Ivanovich why the dead man had not taken his money to the bank.

‘He was too simple, mother; he didn't have enough imagination to do that,' Mark Ivanovich replied.

‘You're too simple, as well, mother,' Okeanov interjected. ‘For twenty years the man held out in that room of yours, and then the merest push knocked him down, but you had cabbage soup on the boil and hadn't any time to see him… Oh – mother!'

‘Ach, the poor lamb!' the landlady went on. ‘He needn't even have used a bank, if he'd just brought his handful of money to me and said to me: “Here, my dearest Ustinya, here is all my wealth, keep me going with your hot dinners until the cold earth swallows me up,” then I swear by the holy icon that I'd have tended him and given him food and drink. But oh, the sinner and deceiver that he was! He tricked and cheated an orphan woman!…'

Again they approached Semyon Ivanovich's bed. Now he lay in state, clad in his best and only suit, hiding his stiff chin in a cravat that was tied a little awkwardly, washed, his hair combed and sleeked, but not quite smoothly shaven, as there was no razor to be found anywhere in the corners: the only one there had been had belonged to Zinovy Prokofyevich, had gone blunt a year earlier and had been sold at a profit on Tolkuchy Market; the others went to the barber's to be shaved. They had not yet had time to clear up the mess. The broken screen still lay where it had done before and, inexposing Semyon Ivanovich's solitariness, seemed like an emblem of the fact that death tears the veil from all our secrets, intrigues and procrastinations. The stuffing from the mattress, which had not been cleared up either, lay all around in thick masses. The whole of this corner which had suddenly grown cold might well have been compared by a poet to the ruined nest of a ‘thrifty' swallow:
^*
it had all
been broken and disfigured by the storm, the fledglings and their mother killed, the warm little nest of down, feathersand strands of cotton blowing about them in the wind… To extend the analogy in a different direction, however, Semyon Ivanovich sooner resembled a thievish and conceited old sparrow. He had piped down now, seemed to be lying low, as though it were not he that was to blame, as though it had not been he that had played tricks in order to cheat and dupe good folk, without shame or conscience, in the most indecent manner. He no longer heard the sobbing and wailing of his orphaned and deeply offended landlady. On the contrary, like a hardened capitalist of long experience, who even in his coffin would not dream of wasting a single moment in inactivity, he seemed to be wholly immersed in some kind of speculative calculations. His face now wore an expression of profound thought, and his lips were pursed with a significant air, an air which during his lifetime no one would ever have suspected to be one of Semyon Ivanovich's characteristic qualities. It was as if he had acquired some cleverness. His right eye seemed to be screwed up in a rascally sort of way; Semyon Ivanovich seemed to be trying to say something, to communicate something extremely urgent, to explain himself without delay, as quickly as possible, as business was pressing and there was no time to lose… And they seemed to hear him say: ‘What are you going on about? Stop it, do you hear, you stupid woman! Don't whimper! Go and sleep it off, woman, do you hear? I'm dead now; there's no need for all of that any more; really, no need at all! I like lying here… But that's not what I mean, do you hear; you're a big shot, a regular big shot of a woman – so understand this: I may be dead now; but, what I mean to say is, well, perhaps it isn't really so, perhaps I'm not dead at all, do you hear – so what if I were to get up, do you hear, what would happen then, eh?'