Short Fiction, Ivan Bunin [reading women .TXT] 📗

still, his face was inflamed; his eyes were drunken, filled with the dull glitter of tipsiness; the lips, grown soft and flabby, were half-open, as in a fever⁠—evidently, this was not the first day of his spree. And the beggar grew a little more wary, and carefully began filling his cup. “After all, now, he’ll drink his and I’ll drink mine.⁠ ⁠… This is a tavern, and we don’t bother one another,” he was thinking. He raised his head, and his mistily-black eyes, the colour of ripe sloe-thorn, as well as his whole visage, made rough and weather-beaten by the steppe, were void of all expression.

“Where was you tramping?” asked the muzhik, roughly and crazily. “Have you come to steal, seeing as how all the folks are out in the fields?”

“Why should I be stealing?” the beggar replied, evenly and meekly. “I’ve had six children of my own, and my own house and goods.⁠ ⁠…”

“You’re blind and you’re blind, but, never fear, many’s the feather and the twig you’ve carried to your nest!”

“Why should you be saying that? I’ve worked hard as could be for ten years in the quartz mines.⁠ ⁠…”

“That ain’t work. That’s.⁠ ⁠…”

“Don’t you be saying anything out of the way,” said the mistress, without elevating her voice, without raising her lashes, and bit off the thread. “I don’t listen to anything unseemly. I ain’t heard it from my husband yet.”

“Well, that will do; I won’t do it any more⁠ ⁠… lady!” said the muzhik. “ ’Scuse me⁠ ⁠… I’m after asking you,” said he to the beggar, frowningly, “what can you get out of the ground, now, when it ain’t been ploughed nor sown?”

“Well, now, of course.⁠ ⁠… Whoever has the land, for example.⁠ ⁠…”

“Wait⁠—I’m smarter than you be!” said the muzhik slapping the table with his palm. “Answer what you’re asked; did you serve for a soldier?”

“I was a noncommissioned officer of the Tenth Grenadiers Regiment of Little Russia, under Count Rumiyantzev-Zadunaisky.⁠ ⁠… What else should I be doing but serving for a soldier?”

“Keep still, don’t gabble more’n you’re asked! What year was you took?”

“In ’seventy six, in the month of November.”

“Wasn’t you ever at fault?”

“Never.”

“Did you obey the officers?”

“There was no way of my doing otherwise. I had taken an oath.”

“But what’s that scar doing on your neck? Do you understand what I’m driving at now? I am testing him,” said the muzhik, with his eyebrows working surlily, but changing his commanding voice for a more simple one, and turning toward the mistress his crazed face, aureately illumined through the tobacco smoke by the sunset; “I may be poor, all right, but I’ve caught more than one fellow like that! I know enough to come in out of the rain!”

And again he put on a frown, looking at the beggar:

“Did you bow down before the Holy Cross and the Gospel?”

“That I have,” answered the beggar, who had managed to take a drink, to wipe his mouth with his sleeve, to sit up straight again, and to impart to his face and his misty eyes a dispassionate expression.

The muzhik surveyed him with glazed eyes.

“Stand up before me!”

“Don’t raise any fuss. Am I talking to you, or am I not?” the mistress quietly intervened.

“Wait, for the love of God,” the muzhik waved her away in vexation. “Stand up before me!”

“Honest to God, what are you up to.⁠ ⁠…” the beggar began to mumble.

“Stand up, I’m telling you!” yelled the muzhik. “I’m a-going to examine you.”

The beggar stood up and shifted from foot to foot.

“Hands at the sides! So. Got a passport?”

“But are you an inspector, or something?”

“Keep still⁠—don’t you dare to jaw back at me like that! I’m smarter than you be! I went all through this myself. Show it to me this minute!”

Hastily unhooking his long overcoat, then his sheepskin jacket, the beggar submissively rummaged within the bosom of his shirt for a long time. Finally he pulled out a paper wrapped up in a red handkerchief.

“Give it here,” said the muzhik abruptly.

And, unwrapping the little handkerchief, the beggar handed him a small frayed gray book, with a large wax seal. The muzhik awkwardly opened it with his gnarled fingers and pretended to read it, putting it at a distance from him, leaning back, and looking at it for a long time through the tobacco smoke and the red light of the evening glow.

“So. I see now. Everything shipshape. Take it back,” he said, his parched lips moving with difficulty. “I am poor as poor can be; it’s the second spring, you might say, that I’m neither ploughing nor sowing; folks have done for me.⁠ ⁠… I fell down at his feet, the dog that he is.⁠ ⁠… And yet I’m beyond a price, you might say.⁠ ⁠… But you just tell me all that you’ve stolen, or else I’ll kill you right off!” he yelled ferociously. “I know everything; I’ve gone through all sorts of things.⁠ ⁠… I’ve been boiled in pitch, you might say⁠—that’s how I’ve suffered.⁠ ⁠… It is the Lord that gives us life, but any vermin can take it away.⁠ ⁠… Give the bag here, and that’s all there is to it!”

The mistress merely shook her head, and leaned back from her embroidery, contemplating it. The beggar went toward the door and gave the muzhik the bag, just as he had given him the passport. The muzhik took it, and, as he laid it near him on the stool, he said:

“That’s right. Now sit down⁠—let’s chat a bit. I’ll get to the bottom of all this here. I’ll make an inspection of my own, don’t you fret!”

And he became silent, staring at the table.

“Spring⁠ ⁠…” he muttered. “Ah, but what a sorrowful sabbath-day it is, that a man may not work in the fields.⁠ ⁠… Go on!” he cried out to some imagined person, trying to snap his fingers:

“Oh, the lady starts to dance,
And her fingers is all blue.⁠ ⁠…”

And he relapsed into silence. The mistress was smoothing down the embroidery with her thimble.

“I’m going out to milk the cow,” said she, getting up from her seat. “Don’t blow