Collected Shorter Fiction, Volume 2

He ate his breakfast as he went along, and rarely managed to have his dinner with the others. The cook swore at him for not bringing everything that was needed, but then felt sorry for him all the same and left him something hot for his dinner or his supper. There was a particularly large amount of work for him on high days and holidays and on the days leading up to them. And Alyosha took special pleasure in the feastdays, because on feastdays they would give him tips, not much, of course – not above sixty copecks all told – but still, it was his own money. He was able to spend it as he wished. His actual wages he never set eyes on. His father would arrive and receive the money from the merchant, merely reprimanding Alyoshka for getting his boots looking worn so quickly.

When he had collected two roubles’ worth of this ‘tea-money’, he bought, on the cook’s advice, a fine knitted jacket, and when he put it on he was unable to stop grinning from sheer pleasure.

Alyosha spoke little, and when he did speak it was always short and fragmentary. And when he was ordered to do something, or asked whether he could do such and such a thing, he always replied without the slightest hesitation ‘I can do that’, and at once threw himself into the task, and did it.

Of prayers, he knew none at all. Whatever his mother had taught him he had forgotten, but he still prayed morning and evening – he prayed with his hands, by crossing himself.

Alyosha’s life went on in this way for a year and a half, and then in the second half of the second year, something happened to him which was the most remarkable event in his life. This event had to do with his astonishing discovery that apart from the relationships between human beings which arise from their mutual needs, there are other, quite special relationships: not the ones which cause a person to brush the boots, to bring home some shopping, or to harness the horse, but the sort of relationship in which a man, although he is not needed at all by the other person, feels the need to devote himself to that other person, to be nice to them; and he discovered that he, Alyosha, was just such a man. He got to know about all this through the cook, Ustinya. Little Ustinya had been an orphan, and a hardworking child just like Alyosha. She began to feel sorry for Alyosha and Alyosha felt for the first time that he, he himself and not his services, was actually needed by another human being. When his mother had shown him that she was sorry for him, he had not really noticed it; it seemed to him that this was how things must be, that it was all one and the same, just as if he had been feeling sorry for himself. But now all of a sudden he realized that Ustinya was quite separate from him, but she did feel sorry for him and would leave him some buttery porridge at the bottom of the pot, and while he ate it she would rest her chin on her arm, the sleeve rolled up to her elbow, and watch him. And he would glance at her, and she would laugh, and then he would laugh too.

All this was so new and strange to him that at first it quite frightened Alyosha. He felt it was preventing him from carrying out his duties as he used to do. But all the same he felt glad, and when he looked at his trousers which Ustinya had darned, he shook his head and smiled. Often when he was working or as he walked along, he would think of Ustinya and say ‘Oh yes, Ustinya!’ Ustinya helped him where she could, and he helped her. She told him all about her past life, how she had lost her parents, how her aunt took her in, then sent her to the town, how the merchant’s son had tried to talk her into doing something stupid, and how she had put him in his place. She loved talking, and he loved listening to her. He had heard that in towns it often happened that peasant workmen ended up marrying cooks. And on one occasion she asked him whether his family would soon be marrying him off. He said he didn’t know, and that he wasn’t keen to take a country girl for a wife.

‘Well then, who have you got your eye set on?’ she said.

‘Ah, I’d like to marry you, of course. Would you be willing to marry me?’

‘Just look at him, he may be only Alyosha the Pot, just a pot, but see how he’s contrived to speak out and say what he wanted,’ she said, giving him a whack on the back with the towel she was holding. ‘And why shouldn’t I marry you indeed?’

At Shrovetide the old man came to town to collect his money. The merchant’s wife had heard how Alexei had hit on the idea that he was going to marry Ustinya, and she did not like it. ‘She’ll go and get pregnant, and what use will she be with a child?’ she said to her husband.

The master paid over the money to Alexei’s father.

‘Well then, and how is the boy behaving himself?’ asked the peasant. ‘I told you he was a meek one.’