Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2

By day he walked, and at night the local policeman would show him to the usual quarters provided for wanderers. Wherever he went people gave him bread, and sometimes even asked him in to have supper with them. In one village in the Oryol province where he was spending the night he was told that a merchant who had leased an orchard from the landowner was looking for fit young fellows as night-watchmen. Vasily was tired of living as a beggar but he did not want to go back to his village, so he went to see the merchant with the orchard and got himself taken on as a night-watchman at a wage of five roubles per month.

Vasily found life in his watchman’s hut very pleasant, particularly when the sweet apples had begun to ripen and the other watchmen brought in huge trusses of fresh straw gathered from under the threshing-machine in the master’s shed. He would lie the whole day long on the fresh, fragrant straw beside the still more fragrant piles of spring and winter windfall apples, just keeping an eye open to make sure the children were not pilfering the apples still on the trees, and whistling and singing songs. Singing songs Vasily was really good at. He had a fine voice. The women and girls would come up from the village to get some apples. Vasily would laugh and joke with them a bit and gave more or less apples in exchange for eggs or a few copecks to whichever of them took his fancy – and then lie down again, only getting up to have his breakfast or his dinner or his supper.

Vasily possessed only one shirt, a pink cotton one full of holes, and he had nothing to put on his feet, but his body was strong and healthy, and when the porridge pot was taken off the fire Vasily would eat enough for three, so that the old man who was the chief watchman was always amazed at him. Vasily did not sleep at night and would whistle or call out to keep himself awake, and he could see a long way in the dark, like a cat. One night some big boys from the village climbed into the trees to shake the apples down. Vasily crept up and went for them; they did their best to beat him off but he sent them all flying, and took one of them back to the hut and handed him over to the master.

Vasily’s first hut was at the far end of the orchard, but the second, where he lived for the sweet apple harvest, was only forty yards from the master’s house. And in this hut Vasily enjoyed himself even more. All day long Vasily could see the gentlemen and the young ladies playing games, going out for drives or walks, and in the evenings and at night playing the piano or the violin, singing or dancing. He would see the students and the young ladies sitting in the windows snuggling up to one another, and then some of them would go for walks in the dark avenues of lime trees, where the moonlight only came through in streaks and patches. He would see the servants hurrying about with food and drink, he would see how the cooks, the laundresses, the stewards, the gardeners, the coachmen – all of them worked just to keep the masters supplied with food and drink and amusement. Sometimes the young gentlefolk would drop in to see him in his hut, and he would choose the finest apples, the ripe and rosy ones, to give to them, and the young ladies would bite into them there and then with a crunching noise, and praise the apples and say something – Vasily knew it was about him – in French, and get him to sing for them.

Vasily greatly admired this way of life, remembering the kind of life he had led in Moscow, and the thought that the beginning and the end of everything was to have money came more and more often into his head.

And Vasily began to think more and more about what he could do to get hold of some more money right away. He started to recall how he had made the odd profit before and he decided that that wasn’t the way to go about it, just helping yourself to whatever was lying about; he needed to work out things in advance, to see what was what, and do a clean job leaving no evidence behind. Towards Christmas time they picked the last of the winter apples. The boss had made a good profit and he paid off all the watchmen, including Vasily, and thanked them.