LITMIR.BIZ

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anything for you! I won’t take a farthing from you. In Moscow they would charge you four roubles for such a cigarette-case, but I won’t take a farthing.’ The doctor will laugh and say: ‘Oh, all right, all right…. I see! But it’s a pity you are a drunkard… .’ I know how to manage the gentry, old girl. There isn’t a gentleman I couldn’t talk to. Only God grant we don’t get off the road. Oh, how it is blowing! One’s eyes are full of snow.”

      And the turner went on muttering endlessly. He prattled on mechanically to get a little relief from his depressing feelings. He had plenty of words on his tongue, but the thoughts and questions in his brain were even more numerous. Sorrow had come upon the turner unawares, unlooked-for, and unexpected, and now he could not get over it, could not recover himself. He had lived hitherto in unruffled calm, as though in drunken half-consciousness, knowing neither grief nor joy, and now he was suddenly aware of a dreadful pain in his heart. The careless idler and drunkard found himself quite suddenly in the position of a busy man, weighed down by anxieties and haste, and even struggling with nature.

      The turner remembered that his trouble had begun the evening before. When he had come home yesterday evening, a little drunk as usual, and from long-established habit had begun swearing and shaking his fists, his old woman had looked at her rowdy spouse as she had never looked at him before. Usually, the expression in her aged eyes was that of a martyr, meek like that of a dog frequently beaten and badly fed; this time she had looked at him sternly and immovably, as saints in the holy pictures or dying people look. From that strange, evil look in her eyes the trouble had begun. The turner, stupefied with amazement, borrowed a horse from a neighbor, and now was taking his old woman to the hospital in the hope that, by means of powders and ointments, Pavel Ivanitch would bring back his old woman’s habitual expression.

      “I say, Matryona, …” the turner muttered, “if Pavel Ivanitch asks you whether I beat you, say, ‘Never!’ and I never will beat you again. I swear it. And did I ever beat you out of spite? I just beat you without thinking. I am sorry for you. Some men wouldn’t trouble, but here I am taking you…. I am doing my best. And the way it snows, the way it snows! Thy Will be done, O Lord! God grant we don’t get off the road…. Does your side ache, Matryona, that you don’t speak? I ask you, does your side ache?”

      It struck him as strange that the snow on his old woman’s face was not melting; it was queer that the face itself looked somehow drawn, and had turned a pale gray, dingy waxen hue and had grown grave and solemn.

      “You are a fool!” muttered the turner…. “I tell you on my conscience, before God,… and you go and… Well, you are a fool! I have a good mind not to take you to Pavel Ivanitch!”

      The turner let the reins go and began thinking. He could not bring himself to look round at his old woman: he was frightened. He was afraid, too, of asking her a question and not getting an answer. At last, to make an end of uncertainty, without looking round he felt his old woman’s cold hand. The lifted hand fell like a log.

      “She is dead, then! What a business!”

      And the turner cried. He was not so much sorry as annoyed. He thought how quickly everything passes in this world! His trouble had hardly begun when the final catastrophe had happened. He had not had time to live with his old woman, to show her he was sorry for her before she died. He had lived with her for forty years, but those forty years had passed by as it were in a fog. What with drunkenness, quarreling, and poverty, there had been no feeling of life. And, as though to spite him, his old woman died at the very time when he felt he was sorry for her, that he could not live without her, and that he had behaved dreadfully badly to her.

      “Why, she used to go the round of the village,” he remembered. “I sent her out myself to beg for bread. What a business! She ought to have lived another ten years, the silly thing; as it is I’ll be bound she thinks I really was that sort of man…. Holy Mother! but where the devil am I driving? There’s no need for a doctor now, but a burial. Turn back!”

      Grigory turned back and lashed the horse with all his might. The road grew worse and worse every hour. Now he could not see the yoke at all. Now and then the sledge ran into a young fir tree, a dark object scratched the turner’s hands and flashed before his eyes, and the field of vision was white and whirling again.

      “To live over again,” thought the turner.

      He remembered that forty years ago Matryona had been young, handsome, merry, that she had come of a well-to-do family. They had married her to him because they had been attracted by his handicraft. All the essentials for a happy life had been there, but the trouble was that, just as he had got drunk after the wedding and lay sprawling on the stove, so he had gone on without waking up till now. His wedding he remembered, but of what happened after the wedding — for the life of him he could remember nothing, except perhaps that he had drunk, lain on the stove, and quarreled. Forty years had been wasted like that.

      The white clouds of snow were beginning little by little to turn gray. It was getting dusk.

      “Where am I going?” the turner suddenly bethought him with a start. “I ought to be thinking of the burial, and I am on the way to the hospital…. It as is though I had gone crazy.”

      Grigory turned round again, and again lashed his horse. The little nag strained its utmost and, with a snort, fell into a little trot. The turner lashed it on the back time after time…. A knocking was audible behind him, and though he did not look round, he knew it was the dead woman’s head knocking against the sledge. And the snow kept turning darker and darker, the wind grew colder and more cutting….

      “To live over again!” thought the turner. “I should get a new lathe, take orders,… give the money to my old woman… .”

      And then he dropped the reins. He looked for them, tried to pick them up, but could not — his hands would not work….

      “It does not matter,” he thought, “the horse will go of itself, it knows the way. I might have a little sleep now…. Before the funeral or the requiem it would be as well to get a little rest… .”

      The turner closed his eyes and dozed. A little later he heard the horse stop; he opened his eyes and saw before him something dark like a hut or a haystack….

      He would have got out of the sledge and found out what it was, but he felt overcome by such inertia that it seemed better to freeze than move, and he sank into a peaceful sleep.

      He woke up in a big room with painted walls. Bright sunlight was streaming in at the windows. The turner saw people facing him, and his first feeling was a desire to show himself a respectable man who knew how things should be done.

      “A requiem, brothers, for my old woman,” he said. “The priest should be told… .”

      “Oh, all right, all right; lie down,” a voice cut him short.

      “Pavel Ivanitch!” the turner cried in surprise, seeing the doctor before him. “Your honor, benefactor! “

      He wanted to leap up and fall on his knees before the doctor, but felt that his arms and legs would not obey him.

      “Your honor, where are my legs, where are my arms!”

      “Say good-by to your arms and legs…. They’ve been frozen off. Come, come!… What are you crying for ? You’ve lived your life, and thank God for it! I suppose you have had sixty years of it — that’s enough for you! …”

      “I am grieving…. Graciously forgive me! If I could have another five or six years! …”

      “What for?”

      “The horse isn’t mine, I must give it back…. I must bury my old woman…. How quickly it is all ended in this world! Your honor, Pavel Ivanitch! A cigarette-case of birchwood of the best! I’ll turn you croquet balls… .”

      The doctor went out of the ward with a wave of his hand. It was all over with the turner.

      OH!

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