Then Stepan took hold of a stone from a pile he had ready, and he smashed Ivan Mironov’s head in.
XV
Ivan Mironov’s murderers were brought to justice. Stepan Pelageyushkin was among them. The charge brought against him was particularly grave because they had all testified that he was the one who had smashed Ivan Mironov’s head in with a stone. At his trial Stepan did not try to conceal anything, but explained how when his last pair of horses had been stolen he had reported it at the police station, and they could probably have tracked the horses down with the help of the gypsies, but the district police officer had not even seen him, and had made no effort to organize a search.
‘What were we supposed to do with a man of his sort? He’d ruined us.’
‘So why didn’t the others beat him? Why just you?’ asked the prosecutor.
‘That’s not true. They all beat him, the village community decided to do away with him. I was just the one who finished him off. Why make him suffer more than necessary?’
The judges were struck by Stepan’s utterly calm expression as he described what he had done and how they had beaten Ivan Mironov to death and how he had finished him off.
Stepan did not indeed see anything very dreadful in this murder. When he was on his military service he had happened to be one of the firing-squad when a soldier was executed, and then, as also now at the murder of Ivan Mironov, he had seen nothing dreadful in it. If you killed a man, you killed a man. It’s his turn today, tomorrow it may be mine.
Stepan’s sentence was a light one: a year in prison. His peasant’s clothes were taken away from him and put in the prison stores with a number attached to them, and they made him put on a prison overall and some slippers.
Stepan had never had much respect for the authorities, but now he was utterly convinced that everyone in authority, all the masters – apart from the Tsar, who pitied the common people and treated them justly – were all of them robbers, sucking the life-blood of the people. The stories told by the exiles and the hard-labour convicts he met in prison confirmed his view of things. One had been sentenced to exile with hard labour for having denounced the thievery of the local authorities, another for striking an official who was trying unlawfully to seize the property of some peasants, and a third, for forging banknotes. The gentry and the merchants, whatever they did, could get away with it, whereas the muzhiks who had nothing got sent off to prison to feed the lice on account of any little thing whatever.
Stepan’s wife came to visit him from time to time in prison. With him away from home things had already been bad enough, but now she was ruined and destitute, and was reduced to begging with the children. The calamities afflicting his wife made Stepan even more bitter. His behaviour was vicious towards everyone he came into contact with in prison, and on one occasion he almost killed one of the cooks with an axe, for which he got an extra year on his sentence. During the course of that year he heard that his wife had died and his household no longer existed …
When Stepan had served his time he was summoned to the prison stores, and the clothes he had arrived in were taken down from a little shelf and given back to him.
‘Where am I to go now?’ he asked the quartermaster-sergeant as he put on his own clothes again.
‘Home, of course.’
‘I haven’t got a home. I reckon I shall just have to go on the road. And rob people.’
‘If you start robbing people, you’ll soon be back in here again.’
‘Well, what will be, will be.’
And Stepan went on his way. Despite what he had said, he set off in the direction of his home. He had nowhere else to go.
On his way there he happened to stop for the night at a coaching inn with a pothouse attached, which he knew.
The inn was kept by a fat tradesman from Vladimir. He knew Stepan. And he knew that Stepan had got himself into prison through bad luck. So he let him stay the night.
This rich tradesman had run off with the wife of a peasant neighbour and was living with her as his wife and business partner.
Stepan knew all about this episode – how the tradesman had offended the muzhik in his honour, and how this wretched woman had walked out on her husband and had grown obese with good eating; and now there she was, sitting all fat and sweaty over her tea – and was kind enough to invite Stepan to have some with her. There were no other travellers staying at the inn. Stepan was allowed to sleep the night in the kitchen. Matryona cleared away all the dishes and went off to the maid’s room. Stepan lay down on top of the stove, but he could not get to sleep, and kept snapping under his body the pieces of kindling which had been put there to dry. He could not get out of his head the image of the tradesman’s fat paunch bulging out of the waist of his cotton shirt, faded with washing and re-washing. The idea kept coming into his head of taking a knife and slashing that paunch wide open and letting out the fatty intestines. And of doing the same to the woman too. One moment he was saying to himself: ‘Come on now, devil take them, I shall be out of here tomorrow,’ and the next moment he would remember Ivan Mironov and start thinking again about the tradesman’s paunch and Matryona’s white, sweaty throat. If he was going to kill one, he might as well kill them both. The cock crew for the second time. If he was going to do it, it had better be now, before it got light. He had noticed a knife the evening before, and an axe. He climbed down from the stove, picked up the axe and the knife and went out of the kitchen. Just as he had got out of the room he heard the click of the latch on another door. The tradesman opened the door and came out. Stepan had not meant to do it like this. He couldn’t use the knife in this situation, so he swung the axe up and brought it down, splitting the man’s head open. The tradesman collapsed against the lintel of the door and fell to the ground.
Stepan went into the maid’s room. Matryona jumped up and stood there by the bed in her nightshirt. Stepan killed her too with the same axe. Then he lit a candle, took the money from the cash desk, and made off.
XVI
In the chief town of a country district, in a house set somewhat apart from the other buildings, lived an old man who had been a civil servant in the days before he had taken to drink, his two daughters, and a son-in-law. The married daughter was also given to drinking and led a disreputable life, but the elder daughter Mariya Semyonovna, a thin, wrinkled woman of fifty whose husband had died, was their sole support on her pension of two hundred and fifty roubles a year. The whole family lived on this money. Mariya Semyonovna also did all the housework. She looked after her weak, drunken old father and her sister’s baby, cooked and did the washing. And as is always the case in such situations, all three of them loaded all their wants and needs on to her, all three of them shouted abuse at her, and the son-in-law would even beat her when he was in a drunken state. She endured it all meekly and silently, and again, as is always the case, the more things she was expected to do, the more she managed to carry out. She even gave aid to the poor, to her own cost, giving away her clothing, and she helped to look after the sick.
On one occasion Mariya Semyonovna had a village tailor, a cripple who had lost one leg, staying in the house to do some work for her. He was altering her old father’s coat and re-covering her sheepskin jacket with cloth for her to wear to market in the winter.
The crippled tailor was an intelligent and perceptive man who had met with a great variety of people in the course of his work, and because of his disability had to spend most of his time sitting down, which disposed him to do a lot of thinking. After living for a week in Mariya Semyonovna’s household he was lost in wonderment for the life she led. Once she came into the kitchen where he was sewing, to wash some towels, and she chatted with him about his life, and how his brother had taken his share of the property and gone off to live on his own.