“What a memory he has!”
Occasionally the poems of Leonide Grave appeared in “The Moscow Gazette.” I was delighted with them. I copied several of them into a note-book, but my employers said of the poet:
“He is an old man, you know; so he writes poetry.”
“A drunkard or an imbecile, it is all the same.”
I liked the poetry of Strujkin, and the Count Memento Mori, but both the women said the verses were clumsy.
“Only the Petrushki or actors talk in verse.”
It was a hard life for me on winter evenings, under the eyes of my employers, in that close, small room.
The dead night lay outside the window, now and again the ice cracked. The others sat at the table in silence, like frozen fish.
A snow-storm would rattle the windows and beat against the walls, howl down the chimney, and shake the flue-plate. The children cried in the nursery. I wanted to sit by myself in a dark corner and howl like a wolf.
At one end of the table sat the women, knitting socks or sewing. At the other sat Victorushka, stooping, copying plans unwillingly, and from time to time calling out:
“Don’t shake the table!
Goats, dogs, mice!”
At the side, behind an enormous embroidery-frame, sat the master, sewing a tablecloth in cross-stitch. Under his fingers appeared red lobsters, blue fish, yellow butterflies, and red autumn leaves.
He had made the design himself, and had sat at the work for three winters. He had grown very tired of it, and often said to me in the daytime, when I had some spare time:
“Come along, Pyeshkov; sit down to the tablecloth and do some of it!”
I sat down, and began to work with the thick needle. I was sorry for my master, and always did my best to help him.
I had an idea that one day he would give up drawing plans, sewing, and playing at cards, and begin doing something quite different, something interesting, about which he often thought, throwing his work aside and gazing at it with fixed, amazed eyes, as at something unfamiliar to him. His hair fell over his forehead and cheeks; he looked like a laybrother in a monastery.
“What are you thinking of?” his wife would ask him.
“Nothing in particular,” he would reply, returning to his work.
I listened in dumb amazement. Fancy asking a man what he was thinking of.
It was a question which could not be answered. One’s thoughts were always sudden and many, about all that passed before one’s eyes, of what one saw yesterday or a year ago. It was all mixed up together, elusive, constantly moving and changing.
The serial in “The Moscow Gazette” was not enough to last the evening, and I went on to read the journals which were put away under the bed in the bedroom. The young mistress asked suspiciously:
“What do you find to read there?
It is all pictures.”
But under the bed, besides the
“Painting Review,” lay also
“Flames,” and so we read “Count Tyatin–Baltiski,” by Saliass.
The master took a great fancy to the eccentric hero of the story, and laughed mercilessly, till the tears ran down his cheeks, at the mel — ancholy adventures of the hero, crying:
“Really, that is most amusing!”
“Piffle!” said the mistress to show her independence of mind.
The literature under the bed did me a great service. Through it, I had obtained the right to read the papers in the kitchen, and thus made it possible to read at night.
To my joy, the old woman went to sleep in the nursery for the nurse had a drunken fit.
Victorushka did not interfere with me.
As soon as the household was asleep, he dressed himself quietly, and disappeared somewhere till morning.
I was not allowed to have a light, for they took the candles into the bedrooms, and I had no money to buy them for myself; so I began to collect the tallow from the candlesticks on the quiet, and put it in a sardine tin, into which I also poured lamp oil, and, making a wick with some thread, was able to make a smoky light. This I put on the stove for the night.
When I turned the pages of the great volumes, the bright red tongue of flame quivered agitatedly, the wick was drowned in the burning, evil-smelling fat, and the smoke made my eyes smart. But all this unpleasantness was swallowed up in the enjoyment with which I looked at the illustrations and read the description of them.
These illustrations opened up be — fore me a world which increased daily in breadth — a world adorned with towns, just like the towns of story-land. They showed me lofty hills and lovely sea — shores.
Life developed wonderfully for me. The earth became more fascinating, rich in people, abounding in towns and all kinds of things.
Now when I gazed into the distance beyond the Volga, I knew that it was not space which lay beyond, but before that, when I had looked, it used to make me feel oddly miserable. The meadows lay flat, bushes grew in clumps, and where the meadows ended, rose the indented black wall of the forest. Above the meadows it was dull, cold blue.
The earth seemed an empty, solitary place.
And my heart also was empty. A gentle sorrow nipped it; all desires had departed, and I thought of nothing. All I wanted was to shut my eyes.
This melancholy emptiness promised me nothing, and sucked out of my heart all that there was in it.
The description of the illustrations told me in language which I could understand about other countries, other peoples. It spoke of various incidents of the past and present, but there was a lot which I did not understand, and that worried me.
Sometimes strange words stuck in my brain, like “metaphysics,” “chiliasm,” “chartist.” They were a source of great anx — iety to me, and seemed to grow into monsters obstruct — ing my vision. I thought that I should never under — stand anything. I did not succeed in finding out the meaning of those words. In fact, they stood like sentries on the threshold of all secret knowledge.
Often whole phrases stuck in my memory for a long time, like a splinter in my finger, and hindered me from thinking of anything else.
I remembered reading these strange verses:
“All clad in steel, through the unpeopled land, Silent and gloomy as the grave, Rides the Czar of the Huns, Attilla.
Behind him comes a black mass of warriors, crying,
‘Where, then, is Rome; where is Rome the mighty? ”
That Rome was a city, I knew; but who on earth were the Huns?