“Where?” asked the guest.
“We have two sons, good sir, and we should have sent them to study long ago, but nobody visits us and there’s no one to advise us. And I don’t know anything myself. Because if they don’t study, they’ll be taken into the army as simple Cossacks. It’s not good, sir! They’re illiterate, worse than peasants, and Ivan Abramych himself scorns them and won’t allow them in his room. But is it their fault? At least the younger one could be sent to study, really, or it’s such a pity!” she said, drawing out the words, and her voice quivered; and it seemed incredible that such a small and young woman already had grown-up children. “Ah, such a pity!”
“You don’t understand anything, Mother, and it’s none of your business,” Zhmukhin said, appearing in the doorway. “Don’t pester the guest with your wild talk. Go away, Mother!”
Lyubov Osipovna left and in the front hall repeated in a high voice:
“Ah, such a pity!”
They made a bed for the guest on the sofa in the reception room and lit an icon lamp so that he would not be in the dark. Zhmukhin lay down in his bedroom. And, lying there, he thought about his soul, about old age, about the recent stroke, which had frightened him so much and had vividly reminded him of death. He liked to philosophize, left by himself, in silence, and then it seemed to him that he was a very serious, profound man, and in this world he was concerned only with important questions. And now he kept thinking, and he wished to settle on some one thought, unlike the others, a significant one, that would be a guidance in life, and he wished to think up some rules for himself, so as to make his life as serious and profound as he himself was. For instance, it would be good if an old man like him could give up meat and various excesses entirely. The time when people stop killing animals and each other would come sooner or later, it could not be otherwise, and he imagined that time to himself, and clearly pictured himself living in peace with all animals, and suddenly he again remembered about the pigs, and everything became confused in his head.
“Lord have mercy, what a puzzle!” he muttered, sighing heavily. “Are you asleep?” he asked.
“No.”
Zhmukhin got out of bed and stood in the doorway in nothing but his nightshirt, showing the guest his legs, sinewy and dry as sticks.
“Nowadays, you know,” he began, “all sorts of telegraphs, telephones, and various wonders, in a word, have come along, but people haven’t gotten better. They say that in our time, some thirty or forty years ago, people were coarse, cruel; but isn’t it the same now? Actually, in my time we lived without ceremony. I remember, in the Caucasus, when we spent a whole four months by the same little river with nothing to do—I was still a sergeant then—a story happened, something like a novel. Right on the bank of that little river, you know, where our squadron was stationed, they buried a little prince we had killed earlier. And by night, you know, the widowed princess came to his grave and wept. She howled and howled, moaned and moaned, and annoyed us so much that we couldn’t sleep at all. We didn’t sleep one night, we didn’t sleep another night; well, enough of that! And, reasoning from common sense, in fact one shouldn’t lose sleep on account of the devil knows what, forgive the expression. We took that princess, gave her a whipping—and she stopped coming. There you have it. Now, of course, people are no longer of that category, and nobody gets whipped, and they live cleaner, and there’s more learning, but, you know, the soul’s still the same, there’s no change. So, kindly see, we’ve got a landowner living here. He owns mines, you know. He’s got people working for him who have nowhere to go: all sorts of vagrants, without passports.4 On Saturdays he was supposed to pay his workers, but he didn’t want to pay them, you know, he was sorry for the money. So he found this clerk, also a bum, though he went around in a hat. ‘Pay them nothing,’ he said, ‘not a kopeck. They’ll beat you, but let them beat you,’ he said, ‘bear with it, and I’ll pay you ten roubles for it every Saturday.’ So on Saturday evening the workers, in good order, as usual, come for their pay; the clerk tells them, ‘No money.’ Well, one thing leads to another, they start a fight, a brawl…They beat him, beat him and kick him—you know, the folk are brutal from hunger—they beat him unconscious, and then go their ways. The owner has the clerk doused with water, then shoves ten roubles at him, which he gladly takes, because in fact he’d do anything, even put his head in a noose, for three roubles, let alone ten. Yes…And on Monday a new party of workers comes; they come, no way out of it…On Saturday, the same story all over again…”
The guest turned on his other side, facing the back of the sofa, and murmured something.
“And here’s another example,” Zhmukhin went on. “Once there was anthrax here, you know; cattle dropping like flies, let me tell you, and veterinarians came here, and there were strict orders to bury the dead animals further, deeper in the ground, and to pour lime on them, you know, on a scientific basis. A horse dropped dead on me, too. I buried it with all the precautions and poured three hundred pounds of lime on it. And what do you think? My fine fellows, you know, these dear sons of mine, dug up the horse at night, skinned it, and sold the skin for three roubles. There you have it. Meaning people haven’t gotten better, and meaning once a wolf, always a wolf. There you have it. There’s something to think about! Eh? How does that strike you?”
In the windows on one side, through the chinks in the shutters, lightning flashed. It was stifling before the storm, mosquitoes were biting, and Zhmukhin, lying in his room and reflecting, groaned, moaned, and said to himself: “Yes…so”—and it was impossible to fall asleep. Thunder rumbled somewhere very far away.
“Are you asleep?”
“No,” the guest replied.
Zhmukhin got up and walked, stomping his heels, through the reception room and the front hall to the kitchen, to have a drink of water.
“The worst thing in the world, you know, is stupidity,” he said a little later, returning with a dipper. “My Lyubov Osipovna kneels and prays to God. She prays every night, you know, and bows to the ground, first of all, that the children be sent to study. She’s afraid they’ll go into the army as simple Cossacks and be whacked across the back with swords. But it takes money for them to study, and where to get it? She can beat her head on the floor, but if there isn’t any, there just isn’t. Second, she prays because, you know, every woman thinks there’s nobody in the world unhappier than she is. I’m a plainspoken man and have no wish to conceal anything from you. She comes from a poor family, a priest’s daughter, the bell-ringing class, so to speak. I married her when she was seventeen, and they gave her to me more on account of having nothing to eat, want, dire poverty, and after all, as you see, I have some land, a farm, well, anyhow, I’m an officer after all; it was flattering for her to marry me, you know. On the first day of our marriage she wept, and after that for all of twenty years she’s been weeping—there was always a tear in her eye. And she goes on sitting and thinking, thinking. And what’s she thinking about, you may ask? What can a woman think about? Nothing. I confess, I don’t consider women human beings.”
The attorney got up abruptly and sat on the bed.
“Sorry, I feel somehow stifled,” he said. “I’ll step outside.”
Zhmukhin, still talking about women, unbolted the door in the front hall, and they both went out. Just then a full moon was floating in the sky over the yard, and in the moonlight the yard and the sheds looked whiter than during the day; and on the grass between the black shadows stretched bright strips of light, also white. To the right the steppe is visible far away, with stars quietly shining over it—and it is all mysterious, infinitely far away, as if you are looking into a deep abyss; and to the left over the steppe heavy thunderclouds are piled on each other, black as soot; their edges are lit by the moon, and it looks as if there are mountains there with white snow on their peaks, dark forests, the sea; lightning flashes, thunder rumbles softly, and it looks as if there is a battle going on in the mountains…