Works of Ivan Turgenev (Illustrated) (388 page)
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Authors: IVAN TURGENEV
I was walking along the street … I was stopped by a decrepit old beggar.
Bloodshot, tearful eyes, blue lips, coarse rags, festering wounds…. Oh, how hideously poverty had eaten into this miserable creature!
He held out to me a red, swollen, filthy hand. He groaned, he mumbled of help.
I began feeling in all my pockets…. No purse, no watch, not even a handkerchief…. I had taken nothing with me. And the beggar was still waiting … and his outstretched hand feebly shook and trembled.
Confused, abashed, I warmly clasped the filthy, shaking hand … ‘Don’t be angry, brother; I have nothing, brother.’
The beggar stared at me with his bloodshot eyes; his blue lips smiled; and he in his turn gripped my chilly fingers.
‘What of it, brother?’ he mumbled; ‘thanks for this, too. That is a gift too, brother.’
I knew that I too had received a gift from my brother.
February 1878.
‘
THOU SHALT HEAR THE FOOL’S JUDGMENT….’ —
PUSHKIN
‘Thou shalt hear the fool’s judgment….’ You always told the truth, O great singer of ours. You spoke it this time, too.
‘The fool’s judgment and the laughter of the crowd’ … who has not known the one and the other?
All that one can, and one ought to bear; and who has the strength, let him despise it!
But there are blows which pierce more cruelly to the very heart…. A man has done all that he could; has worked strenuously, lovingly, honestly…. And honest hearts turn from him in disgust; honest faces burn with indignation at his name. ‘Be gone! Away with you!’ honest young voices scream at him. ‘We have no need of you, nor of your work. You pollute our dwelling - places. You know us not and understand us not…. You are our enemy!’
What is that man to do? Go on working; not try to justify himself, and not even look forward to a fairer judgment.
At one time the tillers of the soil cursed the traveller who brought the potato, the substitute for bread, the poor man’s daily food…. They shook the precious gift out of his outstretched hands, flung it in the mud, trampled it underfoot.
Now they are fed with it, and do not even know their benefactor’s name.
So be it! What is his name to them? He, nameless though he be, saves them from hunger.
Let us try only that what we bring should be really good food.
Bitter, unjust reproach on the lips of those you love…. But that, too, can be borne….
‘Beat me! but listen!’ said the Athenian leader to the Spartan.
‘Beat me! but be healthy and fed!’ we ought to say.
February 1878.
A young man goes skipping and bounding along a street in the capital. His movements are gay and alert; there is a sparkle in his eyes, a smirk on his lips, a pleasing flush on his beaming face…. He is all contentment and delight.
What has happened to him? Has he come in for a legacy? Has he been promoted? Is he hastening to meet his beloved? Or is it simply he has had a good breakfast, and the sense of health, the sense of well - fed prosperity, is at work in all his limbs? Surely they have not put on his neck thy lovely, eight - pointed cross, O Polish king, Stanislas?
No. He has hatched a scandal against a friend, has sedulously sown it abroad, has heard it, this same slander, from the lips of another friend, and —
has himself believed it
!
Oh, how contented! how kind indeed at this minute is this amiable, promising young man!
February 1878.
‘If you want to annoy an opponent thoroughly, and even to harm him,’ said a crafty old knave to me, ‘you reproach him with the very defect or vice you are conscious of in yourself. Be indignant … and reproach him!
‘To begin with, it will set others thinking you have not that vice.
‘In the second place, your indignation may well be sincere…. You can turn to account the pricks of your own conscience.
If you, for instance, are a turncoat, reproach your opponent with having no convictions!
‘If you are yourself slavish at heart, tell him reproachfully that he is slavish … the slave of civilisation, of Europe, of Socialism!’
‘One might even say, the slave of anti - slavishness,’ I suggested.
‘You might even do that,’ assented the cunning knave.
February 1878.
I fancied I was somewhere in Russia, in the wilds, in a simple country house.
The room big and low pitched with three windows; the walls whitewashed; no furniture. Before the house a barren plain; gradually sloping downwards, it stretches into the distance; a grey monotonous sky hangs over it, like the canopy of a bed.
I am not alone; there are some ten persons in the room with me. All quite plain people, simply dressed. They walk up and down in silence, as it were stealthily. They avoid one another, and yet are continually looking anxiously at one another.
Not one knows why he has come into this house and what people there are with him. On all the faces uneasiness and despondency … all in turn approach the windows and look about intently as though expecting something from without.
Then again they fall to wandering up and down. Among us is a small - sized boy; from time to time he whimpers in the same thin voice, ‘Father, I’m frightened!’ My heart turns sick at his whimper, and I too begin to be afraid … of what? I don’t know myself. Only I feel, there is coming nearer and nearer a great, great calamity.
The boy keeps on and on with his wail. Oh, to escape from here! How stifling! How weary! how heavy…. But escape is impossible.
That sky is like a shroud. And no wind…. Is the air dead or what?
All at once the boy runs up to the window and shrieks in the same piteous voice, ‘Look! look! the earth has fallen away!’
‘How? fallen away?’ Yes; just now there was a plain before the house, and now it stands on a fearful height! The horizon has sunk, has gone down, and from the very house drops an almost overhanging, as it were scooped - out, black precipice.
We all crowded to the window…. Horror froze our hearts. ‘Here it is … here it is!’ whispers one next me.
And behold, along the whole far boundary of the earth, something began to stir, some sort of small, roundish hillocks began heaving and falling.
‘It is the sea!’ the thought flashed on us all at the same instant. ‘It will swallow us all up directly…. Only how can it grow and rise upwards? To this precipice?’
And yet, it grows, grows enormously…. Already there are not separate hillocks heaving in the distance…. One continuous, monstrous wave embraces the whole circle of the horizon.
It is swooping, swooping, down upon us! In an icy hurricane it flies, swirling in the darkness of hell. Everything shuddered — and there, in this flying mass — was the crash of thunder, the iron wail of thousands of throats….
Ah! what a roaring and moaning! It was the earth howling for terror….
The end of it! the end of all!
The child whimpered once more…. I tried to clutch at my companions, but already we were all crushed, buried, drowned, swept away by that pitch - black, icy, thundering wave! Darkness … darkness everlasting!
Scarcely breathing, I awoke.
March 1878.
When I lived, many years ago, in Petersburg, every time I chanced to hire a sledge, I used to get into conversation with the driver.
I was particularly fond of talking to the night drivers, poor peasants from the country round, who come to the capital with their little ochre - painted sledges and wretched nags, in the hope of earning food for themselves and rent for their masters.
So one day I engaged such a sledge - driver…. He was a lad of twenty, tall and well - made, a splendid fellow with blue eyes and ruddy cheeks; his fair hair curled in little ringlets under the shabby little patched cap that was pulled over his eyes. And how had that little torn smock ever been drawn over those gigantic shoulders!
But the handsome, beardless face of the sledge - driver looked mournful and downcast.
I began to talk to him. There was a sorrowful note in his voice too.
‘What is it, brother?’ I asked him; ‘why aren’t you cheerful? Have you some trouble?’
The lad did not answer me for a minute. ‘Yes, sir, I have,’ he said at last. ‘And such a trouble, there could not be a worse. My wife is dead.’
‘You loved her … your wife?’
The lad did not turn to me; he only bent his head a little.
‘I loved her, sir. It’s eight months since then … but I can’t forget it. My heart is gnawing at me … so it is! And why had she to die? A young thing! strong!… In one day cholera snatched her away.’
‘And was she good to you?’
‘Ah, sir!’ the poor fellow sighed heavily, ‘and how happy we were together! She died without me! The first I heard here, they’d buried her already, you know; I hurried off at once to the village, home — I got there — it was past midnight. I went into my hut, stood still in the middle of the room, and softly I whispered, “Masha! eh, Masha!” Nothing but the cricket chirping. I fell a - crying then, sat on the hut floor, and beat on the earth with my fists! “Greedy earth!” says I … “You have swallowed her up … swallow me too! — Ah, Masha!”
‘Masha!’ he added suddenly in a sinking voice. And without letting go of the cord reins, he wiped the tears out of his eyes with his sleeve, shook it, shrugged his shoulders, and uttered not another word.
As I got out of the sledge, I gave him a few coppers over his fare. He bowed low to me, grasping his cap in both hands, and drove off at a walking pace over the level snow of the deserted street, full of the grey fog of a January frost.
April 1878.
There lived a fool.
For a long time he lived in peace and contentment; but by degrees rumours began to reach him that he was regarded on all sides as a vulgar idiot.
The fool was abashed and began to ponder gloomily how he might put an end to these unpleasant rumours.
A sudden idea, at last, illuminated his dull little brain…. And, without the slightest delay, he put it into practice.
A friend met him in the street, and fell to praising a well - known painter….
‘Upon my word!’ cried the fool,’ that painter was out of date long ago … you didn’t know it? I should never have expected it of you … you are quite behind the times.’
The friend was alarmed, and promptly agreed with the fool.
‘Such a splendid book I read yesterday!’ said another friend to him.
‘Upon my word!’ cried the fool, ‘I wonder you’re not ashamed. That book’s good for nothing; every one’s seen through it long ago. Didn’t you know it? You’re quite behind the times.’
This friend too was alarmed, and he agreed with the fool.
‘What a wonderful fellow my friend N. N. is!’ said a third friend to the fool. ‘Now there’s a really generous creature!’
‘Upon my word!’ cried the fool. ‘N. N., the notorious scoundrel! He swindled all his relations. Every one knows that. You’re quite behind the times.’
The third friend too was alarmed, and he agreed with the fool and deserted his friend. And whoever and whatever was praised in the fool’s presence, he had the same retort for everything.
Sometimes he would add reproachfully: ‘And do you still believe in authorities?’
‘Spiteful! malignant!’ his friends began to say of the fool. ‘But what a brain!’
‘And what a tongue!’ others would add, ‘Oh, yes, he has talent!’
It ended in the editor of a journal proposing to the fool that he should undertake their reviewing column.
And the fool fell to criticising everything and every one, without in the least changing his manner, or his exclamations.
Now he, who once declaimed against authorities, is himself an authority, and the young men venerate him, and fear him.
And what else can they do, poor young men? Though one ought not, as a general rule, to venerate any one … but in this case, if one didn’t venerate him, one would find oneself quite behind the times!
Fools have a good time among cowards.
April 1878.
