|
|
|
A.P. Chekhov
- The Murder
I
II
III IV
V
VI
VII
I
The evening service was being celebrated at
Progonnaya Station. Before the great ikon, painted in glaring
colours on a background of gold, stood the crowd of railway
servants with their wives and children, and also of the
timbermen and sawyers who worked close to the railway line. All
stood in silence, fascinated by the glare of the lights and the
howling of the snow-storm which was aimlessly disporting itself
outside, regardless of the fact that it was the Eve of the
Annunciation. The old priest from Vedenyapino conducted the
service; the sacristan and Matvey Terehov were singing.
Matvey's face was beaming with delight; he sang stretching out
his neck as though he wanted to soar upwards. He sang tenor and
chanted the "Praises" too in a tenor voice with honied sweetness
and persuasiveness. When he sang "Archangel Voices" he waved his
arms like a conductor, and trying to second the sacristan's
hollow bass with his tenor, achieved something extremely
complex, and from his face it could be seen that he was
experiencing great pleasure.
At last the service was over, and they all quietly dispersed,
and it was dark and empty again, and there followed that hush
which is only known in stations that stand solitary in the open
country or in the forest when the wind howls and nothing else is
heard and when all the emptiness around, all the dreariness of
life slowly ebbing away is felt.
Matvey lived not far from the station at his cousin's tavern.
But he did not want to go home. He sat down at the refreshment
bar and began talking to the waiter in a low voice.
"We had our own choir in the tile factory. And I must tell you
that though we were only workmen, our singing was first-rate,
splendid. We were often invited to the town, and when the Deputy
Bishop, Father Ivan, took the service at Trinity Church, the
bishop's singers sang in the right choir and we in the left.
Only they complained in the town that we kept the singing on too
long: 'the factory choir drag it out,' they used to say. It is
true we began St. Andrey's prayers and the Praises between six
and seven, and it was past eleven when we finished, so that it
was sometimes after midnight when we got home to the factory. It
was good," sighed Matvey. "Very good it was, indeed, Sergey
Nikanoritch! But here in my father's house it is anything but
joyful. The nearest church is four miles away; with my weak
health I can't get so far; there are no singers there. And there
is no peace or quiet in our family; day in day out, there is an
uproar, scolding, uncleanliness; we all eat out of one bowl like
peasants; and there are beetles in the cabbage soup. . . . God
has not given me health, else I would have gone away long ago,
Sergey Nikanoritch."
Matvey Terehov was a middle-aged man about forty-five, but he
had a look of ill-health; his face was wrinkled and his lank,
scanty beard was quite grey, and that made him seem many years
older. He spoke in a weak voice, circumspectly, and held his
chest when he coughed, while his eyes assumed the uneasy and
anxious look one sees in very apprehensive people. He never said
definitely what was wrong with him, but he was fond of
describing at length how once at the factory he had lifted a
heavy box and had ruptured himself, and how this had led to "the
gripes," and had forced him to give up his work in the tile
factory and come back to his native place; but he could not
explain what he meant by "the gripes."
"I must own I am not fond of my cousin," he went on, pouring
himself out some tea. "He is my elder; it is a sin to censure
him, and I fear the Lord, but I cannot bear it in patience. He
is a haughty, surly, abusive man; he is the torment of his
relations and workmen, and constantly out of humour. Last Sunday
I asked him in an amiable way, 'Brother, let us go to Pahomovo
for the Mass!' but he said 'I am not going; the priest there is
a gambler;' and he would not come here to-day because, he said,
the priest from Vedenyapino smokes and drinks vodka. He doesn't
like the clergy! He reads Mass himself and the Hours and the
Vespers, while his sister acts as sacristan; he says, 'Let us
pray unto the Lord'! and she, in a thin little voice like a
turkey-hen, 'Lord, have mercy upon us! . . .' It's a sin, that's
what it is. Every day I say to him, 'Think what you are doing,
brother! Repent, brother!' and he takes no notice."
Sergey Nikanoritch, the waiter, poured out five glasses of tea
and carried them on a tray to the waiting-room. He had scarcely
gone in when there was a shout:
"Is that the way to serve it, pig's face? You don't know how to
wait!"
It was the voice of the station-master. There was a timid
mutter, then again a harsh and angry shout:
"Get along!"
The waiter came back greatly crestfallen.
"There was a time when I gave satisfaction to counts and
princes," he said in a low voice; "but now I don't know how to
serve tea. . . . He called me names before the priest and the
ladies!"
The waiter, Sergey Nikanoritch, had once had money of his own,
and had kept a buffet at a first-class station, which was a
junction, in the principal town of a province. There he had worn
a swallow-tail coat and a gold chain. But things had gone ill
with him; he had squandered all his own money over expensive
fittings and service; he had been robbed by his staff, and
getting gradually into difficulties, had moved to another
station less bustling. Here his wife had left him, taking with
her all the silver, and he moved to a third station of a still
lower class, where no hot dishes were served. Then to a fourth.
Frequently changing his situation and sinking lower and lower,
he had at last come to Progonnaya, and here he used to sell
nothing but tea and cheap vodka, and for lunch hard-boiled eggs
and dry sausages, which smelt of tar, and which he himself
sarcastically said were only fit for the orchestra. He was bald
all over the top of his head, and had prominent blue eyes and
thick bushy whiskers, which he often combed out, looking into
the little looking-glass. Memories of the past haunted him
continually; he could never get used to sausage "only fit for
the orchestra," to the rudeness of the station-master, and to
the peasants who used to haggle over the prices, and in his
opinion it was as unseemly to haggle over prices in a
refreshment room as in a chemist's shop. He was ashamed of his
poverty and degradation, and that shame was now the leading
interest of his life.
"Spring is late this year," said Matvey, listening. "It's a good
job; I don't like spring. In spring it is very muddy, Sergey
Nikanoritch. In books they write: Spring, the birds sing, the
sun is setting, but what is there pleasant in that? A bird is a
bird, and nothing more. I am fond of good company, of listening
to folks, of talking of religion or singing something agreeable
in chorus; but as for nightingales and flowers -- bless them, I
say!"
He began again about the tile factory, about the choir, but
Sergey Nikanoritch could not get over his mortification, and
kept shrugging his shoulders and muttering. Matvey said good-bye
and went home.
There was no frost, and the snow was already melting on the
roofs, though it was still falling in big flakes; they were
whirling rapidly round and round in the air and chasing one
another in white clouds along the railway line. And the oak
forest on both sides of the line, in the dim light of the moon
which was hidden somewhere high up in the clouds, resounded with
a prolonged sullen murmur. When a violent storm shakes the
trees, how terrible they are! Matvey walked along the causeway
beside the line, covering his face and his hands, while the wind
beat on his back. All at once a little nag, plastered all over
with snow, came into sight; a sledge scraped along the bare
stones of the causeway, and a peasant, white all over, too, with
his head muffled up, cracked his whip. Matvey looked round after
him, but at once, as though it had been a vision, there was
neither sledge nor peasant to be seen, and he hastened his
steps, suddenly scared, though he did not know why.
Here was the crossing and the dark little house where the
signalman lived. The barrier was raised, and by it perfect
mountains had drifted and clouds of snow were whirling round
like witches on broomsticks. At that point the line was crossed
by an old highroad, which was still called "the track." On the
right, not far from the crossing, by the roadside stood
Terehov's tavern, which had been a posting inn. Here there was
always a light twinkling at night.
When Matvey reached home there was a strong smell of incense in
all the rooms and even in the entry. His cousin Yakov Ivanitch
was still reading the evening service. In the prayer-room where
this was going on, in the corner opposite the door, there stood
a shrine of old-fashioned ancestral ikons in gilt settings, and
both walls to right and to left were decorated with ikons of
ancient and modern fashion, in shrines and without them. On the
table, which was draped to the floor, stood an ikon of the
Annunciation, and close by a cyprus-wood cross and the censer;
wax candles were burning. Beside the table was a reading desk.
As he passed by the prayer-room, Matvey stopped and glanced in
at the door. Yakov Ivanitch was reading at the desk at that
moment, his sister Aglaia, a tall lean old woman in a dark-blue
dress and white kerchief, was praying with him. Yakov Ivanitch's
daughter Dashutka, an ugly freckled girl of eighteen, was there,
too, barefoot as usual, and wearing the dress in which she had
at nightfall taken water to the cattle.
"Glory to Thee Who hast shown us the light!" Yakov Ivanitch
boomed out in a chant, bowing low.
Aglaia propped her chin on her hand and chanted in a thin,
shrill, drawling voice. And upstairs, above the ceiling, there
was the sound of vague voices which seemed menacing or ominous
of evil. No one had lived on the storey above since a fire there
a long time ago. The windows were boarded up, and empty bottles
lay about on the floor between the beams. Now the wind was
banging and droning, and it seemed as though someone were
running and stumbling over the beams.
Half of the lower storey was used as a tavern, while Terehov's
family lived in the other half, so that when drunken visitors
were noisy in the tavern every word they said could be heard in
the rooms. Matvey lived in a room next to the kitchen, with a
big stove, in which, in old days, when this had been a posting
inn, bread had been baked every day. Dashutka, who had no room
of her own, lived in the same room behind the stove. A cricket
chirped there always at night and mice ran in and out.
Matvey lighted a candle and began reading a book which he had
borrowed from the station policeman. While he was sitting over
it the service ended, and they all went to bed. Dashutka lay
down, too. She began snoring at once, but soon woke up and said,
yawning:
"You shouldn't burn a candle for nothing, Uncle Matvey."
"It's my candle," answered Matvey; "I bought it with my own
money."
Dashutka turned over a little and fell asleep again. Matvey sat
up a good time longer -- he was not sleepy -- and when he had
finished the last page he took a pencil out of a box and wrote
on the book:
"I, Matvey Terehov, have read this book, and think it the very
best of all the books I have read, for which I express my
gratitude to the non-commissioned officer of the Police
Department of Railways, Kuzma Nikolaev Zhukov, as the possessor
of this priceless book."
He considered it an obligation of politeness to make such
inscriptions in other people's books.
|
|
|
