Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2

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.

‘I thought it would be better like that, but I’m still as poor as ever.’

‘It’s better not to change things, but to go on living as you’ve always lived,’ said Mariya Semyonovna.

‘That’s what amazes me so much about you, Mariya Semyonovna, that you’re always bustling about here and there worrying about other people’s needs. But as I see it, you get precious little good back from them in return.’

Mariya Semyonovna did not answer.

‘You must have decided that it’s like it says in the holy books, that you’ll get your reward in the next world.’

‘We don’t know about that,’ said Mariya Semyonovna, ‘but I’m sure it’s better to live in that way.’

‘And is that what it says in the holy books?’