Women, brother, love to touch one on a weak spot.”
For some time past my master had been quiet and thoughtful; he had a trick of looking about him cautiously, and the sound of the bell startled him. Some — times he would give way to a painful irritability about trifles, would scold us all, and rush out of the house, returning drunk late at night.
One felt that something had come into his life which was known only to himself, which had lacerated his heart; and that he was living not sensibly, or willingly, but simply by force of habit.
On Sundays from dinner-time till nine o’clock I was free to go out and about, and the evenings I spent at a tavern in Yamski Street. The host, a stout and always perspiring man, was passionately fond of singing, and the choristers of most of the churches knew this, and used to frequent his house. He treated them with vodka, beer, or tea, for their songs.
The choristers were a drunken and uninteresting set of people; they sang unwillingly, only for the sake of the hospitality, and almost always it was church music. As certain of the pious drunkards did not consider that the tavern was the place for them, the host used to invite them to his private room, and I could only hear the singing through the door.
But frequently peasants from the villages, and artisans came. The tavern-keeper himself used to go about the town inquiring for singers, asking the peasants who came in on market-days, and inviting them to his house.
The singer was always given a chair close to the bar, his back to a cask of vodka; his head was outlined against the bottom of the cask as if it were in a round frame.
The best singer of all — and they were always particularly good singers — was the small, lean harness — maker, Kleshtchkov, who looked as if he had been squeezed, and had tufts of red hair on his head. His little nose gleamed like that of a corpse; his. benign, dreamy eyes were immovable.
Sometimes he closed his eyes, leaned the back of his head against the bottom of the cask, protruding his chest, and in his soft but all-conquering tenor voice sang the quick moving:
“Ekh! how the fog has fallen upon the clean fields already!
And has hidden the distant roads!”
Here he would stop, and resting his back against the bar, bending backwards, went on, with his face raised toward the ceiling:
“Ekh! where — where am I going?
Where shall I find the broad ro-oad?”
His voice was small like himself, but it was unwearied; he permeated the dark, dull room of the tav — ern with silvery chords, melancholy words. His groans and cries conquered every one; even the drunken ones became amazedly surprised, gazing down in si-lence at the tables in front of them. As for me, my heart was torn, and overflowed with those mighty feel-ings which good music always arouses as it miracu — lously touches the very depths of the soul.
It was as quiet in the tavern as in a church, and the singer seemed like a good priest, who did not preach, but with all his soul, and honestly, prayed for the whole human family, thinking aloud, as it were, of all the grievous calamities which beset human life.
Bearded men gazed upon him; childlike eyes blinked in fierce, wild faces; at moments some one sighed, and this seemed to emphasize the triumphant power of the music.
At such times it always seemed to me that the lives led by most people were unreal and meaningless, and that the reality of life lay here.
In the corner sat the fat-faced old-clothes dealer, Luissukha, a repulsive female, a shameless, loose woman. She hid her head on her fat shoulder and wept, furtively wiping the tears from her bold eyes.
Not far from her sat the gloomy chorister, Mitropolski, a hirsute young fellow who looked like a degraded deacon, with great eyes set in his drunken face. He gazed into the glass of vodka placed before him, took it up, and raised it to his mouth, and then set it down again on the table, carefully and noiselessly. For some reason he could not drink.
And all the people in the tavern seemed to be glued to their places, as if they were listening to something long forgotten, but once dear and near to them.
When Kleshtchkov, having finished his song, modestly sank down in the chair, the tavern-keeper, giving him a glass of wine, would say with a smile of satisfaction:
“Well, that was very good, sure!
Although you can hardly be said to sing, so much as to recite! However, you are a master of it, whatever they say!
No one could say otherwise.”
Kleshtchkov, drinking his vodka without haste, coughed carefully and said quietly:
“Any one can sing if he has a voice, but to show what kind of soul the song contains is only given to me.”
“Well, you needn’t boast, anyhow.”
“He who has nothing to boast about, does not boast,” said the singer as quietly but more firmly than before.
“You are conceited, Kleshtchkov!” exclaimed the host, annoyed.
“One can’t be more conceited than one’s conscience allows.”
And from the corner the gloomy Mitropolski roared:
“What do you know about the singing of this fallen angel, you worms, you dirt!”
He always opposed every one, argued with every one, brought accusations against every one; and almost every Sunday he was cruelly punished for this by one of the singers, or whoever else had a mind for the business.
The tavern-keeper loved Kleshtchkov’s singing, but he could not endure the singer. He used to complain about him, and obviously sought occasions to humiliate him and to make him ridiculous. This fact was known to the frequenters of the tavern and to Kleshtchkov himself.
“He is a good singer, but he is proud; he wants taking down,” he said, and several guests agreed with him.
“That’s true; he’s a conceited fellow!”
“What’s he got to be conceited about?
His voice? That comes from God; he has nothing to do with it!
And he hasn’t a very powerful voice, has he?” the tavern-keeper persisted.
His audience agreed with him.
“True, it is not so much his voice as his intelligence.”
One day after the singer had refreshed himself and gone away, the tavern-keeper tried to persuade Luissukha.
“Why don’t you amuse yourself with Kleshtchkov for a bit, Marie Evdokimova; you’d shake him up, wouldn’t you?
What would you want for it?”
“If I were younger,” she said with a laugh.
The tavern-keeper cried loudly and warmly:
“What can the young ones do?
But you — you will get hold of him!
We shall see him dancing round you!