II
THE carriage was ready but the driver still loitered. He had gone into the drivers’ room at the station. It was hot, stuffy, and dark there, with an oppressive smell of baking bread, cabbage, sheepskin garments, and humanity. Several drivers were sitting in the room, and a cook was busy at the oven, on the top of which lay a sick man wrapped in sheepskins.
‘Uncle Theodore! I say, Uncle Theodore!’ said the young driver, entering the room in his sheepskin coat with a whip stuck in his belt, and addressing the sick man.
‘What do you want Theodore for, lazybones?’ asked one of the drivers. ‘There’s your carriage waiting for you.’
‘I want to ask for his boots; mine are quite worn out,’ answered the young fellow, tossing back his hair and straightening the mittens tucked in his belt. ‘Is he asleep? I say, Uncle Theodore!’ he repeated, walking over to the oven.
‘What is it?’ answered a weak voice, and a lean face with a red beard looked down from the oven, while a broad, emaciated, pale, and hairy hand pulled up the coat over the dirty shirt covering his angular shoulder.
‘Give me a drink, lad.… What is it you want?’
The lad handed him up a dipper with water.
‘Well, you see, Theodore,’ he said, stepping from foot to foot, ‘I expect you don’t need your new boots now; won’t you let me have them? I don’t suppose you’ll go about any more.’
The sick man, lowering his weary head to the shiny dipper and immersing his sparse drooping moustache in the turbid water, drank feebly but eagerly. His matted beard was dirty, and his sunken clouded eyes had difficulty in looking up at the lad’s face. Having finished drinking he tried to lift his hand to wipe his wet lips, but he could not do so, and rubbed them on the sleeve of his coat instead. Silently, and breathing heavily through his nose, he looked straight into the lad’s eyes, collecting his strength.
‘But perhaps you have promised them to someone else?’ asked the lad. ‘If so, it’s all right. The worst of it is, it’s wet outside and I have to go about my work, so I said to myself: “Suppose I ask Theodore for his boots; I expect he doesn’t need them.” If you need them yourself—just say so.’
Something began to rumble and gurgle in the sick man’s chest; he doubled up and began to choke with an abortive cough in his throat.
‘Need them indeed!’ the cook snapped out unexpectedly so as to be heard by the whole room. ‘He hasn’t come down from the oven for more than a month! Hear how he’s choking – it makes me ache inside just to hear him. What does he want with boots? They won’t bury him in new boots. And it was time long ago – God forgive me the sin! See how he chokes. He ought to be taken into the other room or somewhere. They say there are hospitals in the town. Is it right that he should take up the whole corner? – there’s no more to be said. I’ve no room at all, and yet they expect cleanliness!’
‘Hullo, Sergéy! Come along and take your place, the gentlefolk are waiting!’ shouted the drivers’ overseer, looking in at the door.
Sergéy was about to go without waiting for a reply, but the sick man, while coughing, let him understand by a look that he wanted to give him an answer.
‘Take my boots, Sergéy,’ he said when he had mastered the cough and rested a moment. ‘But listen.… Buy a stone for me when I die,’ he added hoarsely.
‘Thank you, uncle. Then I’ll take them, and I’ll buy a stone for sure.’
‘There, lads, you heard that?’ the sick man managed to utter, and then bent double again and began to choke.
‘All right, we heard,’ said one of the drivers. ‘Go and take your seat, Sergéy, there’s the overseer running back. The Shírkin lady is ill, you know.’
Sergéy quickly pulled off his unduly big, dilapidated boots and threw them under a bench. Uncle Theodore’s new boots just fitted him, and having put them on he went to the carriage with his eyes fixed on his feet.
‘What fine boots! Let me grease them,’ said a driver, who held some axle-grease in his hand, as Sergéy climbed onto the box and gathered up the reins. ‘Did he give them to you for nothing?’
‘Why, are you envious?’ Sergéy replied, rising and wrapping the skirts of his coat under his legs. ‘Off with you! Gee up, my beauties!’ he shouted to the horses, nourishing the whip, and the carriage and calèche with their occupants, portmanteaux, and trunks rolled rapidly along the wet road and disappeared in the grey autumnal mist.
The sick driver was left on the top of the oven in the stuffy room and, unable to relieve himself by coughing, turned with an effort onto his other side and became silent.
Till late in the evening people came in and out of the room and dined there. The sick man made no sound. When night came, the cook climbed up onto the oven and stretched over his legs to get down her sheepskin coat.
‘Don’t be cross with me, Nastásya,’ said the sick man. ‘I shall soon leave your corner empty.’
‘All right, all right, never mind,’ muttered Nastásya. ‘But what is it that hurts you? Tell me, uncle.’
‘My whole inside has wasted away. God knows what it is!’
‘I suppose your throat hurts when you cough?’
‘Everything hurts. My death has come – that’s how it is. Oh, oh, oh!’ moaned the sick man.
‘Cover up your feet like this,’ said Nastásya, drawing his coat over him as she climbed down from the oven.
A night-light burnt dimly in the room. Nastásya and some ten drivers slept on the floor or on the benches, loudly snoring. The sick man groaned feebly, coughed, and turned about on the oven. Towards morning he grew quite quiet.
‘I had a queer dream last night,’ said Nastásya next morning, stretching herself in the dim light. ‘I dreamt that Uncle Theodore got down from the oven and went out to chop wood. “Come, Nastásya,” he says, “I’ll help you!” and I say, “How can you chop wood now?”, but he just seizes the axe and begins chopping quickly, quickly, so that the chips fly all about. “Why,” I say, “haven’t you been ill?” “No,” he says, “I am well,” and he swings the axe so that I was quite frightened. I gave a cry and woke up. I wonder whether he is dead! Uncle Theodore! I say, Uncle Theodore!’
Theodore did not answer.
‘True enough he may have died. I’ll go and see,’ said one of the drivers, waking up.
The lean hand covered with reddish hair that hung down from the oven was pale and cold.
‘I’ll go and tell the station-master,’ said the driver. ‘I think he is dead.’
Theodore had no relatives: he was from some distant place. They buried him next day in the new cemetery beyond the wood, and Nastásya went on for days telling everybody of her dream, and of having been the first to discover that Uncle Theodore was dead.
III
SPRING had come. Rivulets of water hurried down the wet streets of the city, gurgling between lumps of frozen manure; the colours of the people’s clothes as they moved along the streets looked vivid and their voices sounded shrill. Behind the garden-fences the buds on the trees were swelling and their branches were just audibly swaying in the fresh breeze. Everywhere transparent drops were forming and falling.… The sparrows chirped, and fluttered awkwardly with their little wings. On the sunny side of the street, on the fences, houses, and trees, everything was in motion and sparkling. There was joy and youth everywhere in the sky, on the earth, and in the hearts of men.
In one of the chief streets fresh straw had been strewn on the road before a large, important house, where the invalid who had been in a hurry to go abroad lay dying.
At the closed door of her room stood the invalid’s husband and an elderly woman. On the sofa a priest sat with bowed head, holding something wrapped in his stole. In a corner of the room the sick woman’s old mother lay on an invalid chair weeping bitterly: beside her stood one maidservant holding a clean handkerchief, waiting for her to ask for it; while another was rubbing her temples with something and blowing under the old lady’s cap onto her grey head.