I feel that for us educated people it is hardly the thing to laugh at Polikéy. The methods he employed to inspire confidence are the same that influenced our fathers, that influence us, and will influence our children. The peasant lying prone on the head of his only mare (which not only constitutes his whole wealth but is almost one of his family) and gazing with faith and horror at Polikéy’s frowning look of importance and thin arms with upturned sleeves, as, with the healing rag or a bottle of vitriol between his teeth, he presses upon the very spot that is sore and boldly cuts into the living flesh (with the secret thought, ‘The bow-legged brute will be sure to get over it!’), at the same time pretending to know where is blood and where pus, which is a tendon and which a vein – that peasant cannot conceive that Polikéy could lift his hand to cut without knowing where to do it. He himself could not do so. And once the thing is done he will not reproach himself with having given permission to cut unnecessarily. I don’t know how you feel about it, but I have gone through the same experience with a doctor who, at my request, was tormenting those dear to me. The lancet, the whitish bottle of sublimate, and the words, ‘the staggers – glanders – to let blood, or matter’, and so on, do they not come to the same thing as ‘neurosis, rheumatism, organisms’, and so forth? Wage du zu irren und zu träumen3 refers not so much to poets as to doctors and veterinary surgeons.
III
ON the evening when the village meeting, in the cold darkness of an October night, was choosing the recruits and vociferating in front of the office, Polikéy sat on the edge of his bed pounding some horse medicine on the table with a bottle – but what it was he himself did not know. He had there corrosive sublimate, sulphur, Glauber’s salts, and some kind of herb which he had gathered, having suddenly imagined it to be good for broken wind and then considered it not amiss for other disorders. The children were already lying down – two on the stove, two on the bed, and one in the cradle beside which Akulína sat spinning. The candle-end – one of the proprietress’s candles which had not been put away carefully enough – was burning in a wooden candlestick on the window-sill and Akulína every now and then got up to snuff it with her fingers, so that her husband should not have to break off his important occupation. There were some free-thinkers who regarded Polikéy as a worthless veterinary and a worthless man. Others, the majority, considered him a worthless man but a great master of his art; but Akulína, though she often scolded and even beat her husband, thought him undoubtedly the first of horse-doctors and the best of men. Polikéy sprinkled some kind of simple on the palm of his hand (he never used scales, and spoke ironically of the Germans who use them: ‘This,’ he used to say, ‘is not an apothecary’s!’). Polikéy weighed the simple on his hand and tossed it up, but there did not seem enough of it and he poured in ten times more. ‘I’ll put in the lot,’ he said to himself. ‘It will pick ’em up better.’ Akulína quickly turned round at the sound of her lord and master’s voice, expecting some command; but seeing that the business did not concern her she shrugged her shoulders. ‘What knowledge! … Where does he get it?’ she thought, and went on spinning. The paper which had held the simple fell to the floor. Akulína did not overlook this.
‘Annie,’ she cried, ‘look! Father has dropped something. Pick it up!’
Annie put out her thin little bare legs from under the cloak with which she was covered, slid down under the table like a kitten, and got the paper.
‘Here, daddy,’ she said, and darted back into bed with her chilled little feet.
‘Don’t puth!’ squeaked her lisping younger sister sleepily.
‘I’ll give it you!’ muttered Akulína, and both heads disappeared again under the cloak.
‘He’ll give me three rubles,’ said Polikéy, corking up the bottle. ‘I’ll cure the horse. It’s even too cheap,’ he added, ‘brain-splitting work! … Akulína, go and ask Nikíta for a little ‘baccy. I’ll pay him back to-morrow.’
Polikéy took out of his trouser-pocket a lime-wood pipe-stem, which had once been painted, with a sealing-wax mouthpiece, and began fixing it onto the bowl.
Akulína left her spindle and went out, managing to steer clear of everything – though this was not easy. Polikéy opened the cupboard and put away the medicine, then tilted a vodka bottle into his mouth, but it was empty and he made a grimace. But when his wife brought the tobacco he sat down on the edge of the bed, after filling and lighting his pipe, and his face beamed with the content and pride of a man who has completed his day’s task. Whether he was thinking how on the morrow he would catch hold of the horse’s tongue and pour his wonderful mixture down its throat, or reflecting that a useful person never gets a refusal – ‘There, now! Hadn’t Nikíta sent him the tobacco?’ – anyhow he felt happy. Suddenly the door, which hung on one hinge, was thrown open and a maidservant from up there – not the second maid but the third, the little one that was kept to run errands – entered their corner. (Up there, as everyone knows, means the master’s house, even if it stands on lower ground.) Aksyútka – that was the girl’s name – always flew like a bullet, and did it without bending her arms, which keeping time with the speed of her flight swung like pendulums, not at her sides but in front of her. Her cheeks were always redder than her pink dress, and her tongue moved as fast as her legs. She flew into the room, and for some reason catching hold of the stove, began to sway to and fro; then as if intent on not emitting more than two or three words at once, she suddenly addressed Akulína breathlessly as follows:
‘The mistress … has given orders … that Polikéy should come this minute … orders to come up.…’
She stopped, drawing breath with difficulty.
‘Egór Mikháylovich has been with the mistress … they talked about rickruits … they mentioned Polikéy … Avdótya Nikoláevna … has ordered him to come this minute … Avdótya Nikoláevna has ordered …’ again a sigh, ‘to come this minute.…’
For half a minute Aksyútka looked round at Polikéy and at Akulína and the children – who had put out their heads from under their coverlets – picked up a nutshell that lay on the stove and threw it at little Annie. Then she repeated: ‘To come this minute!…’ and rushed out of the room like a whirlwind, the pendulums swinging as usual across her line of flight.
Akulína again rose and got her husband his boots – abominable soldier’s boots with holes in them – and took down his coat from the stove and handed it to him without looking at him.
‘Won’t you change your shirt, Polikéy?’
‘No,’ he answered.
Akulína never once looked at his face while he put on his boots and coat, and she did well not to look. Polikéy’s face was pale, his nether jaw twitched, and in his eyes there was that tearful, meek, and deeply mournful look one only sees in the eyes of kindly, weak, and guilty people. – He combed his hair and was going out; but his wife stopped him, tucked in the string of his shirt that hung down from under his coat, and put his cap on for him.
‘What’s that, Polikéy? Has the mistress sent for you?’ came the voice of the carpenter’s wife from behind the partition.
Only that very morning the carpenter’s wife had had high words with Akulína about her pot of lye4 that Polikéy’s children had upset in her corner, and at first she was pleased to hear Polikéy being summoned to the mistress – most likely for no good. She was a subtle, diplomatic lady, with a biting tongue. Nobody knew better than she how to cut one with a word: so at least she imagined.