Short Fiction, Leo Tolstoy [general ebook reader .txt] 📗

out to work. Only Agatha remained in the hut.

He was lying on the shelf-bed, on a dry coat the old woman had spread for him.

Agatha was taking bread out of the oven.

“My dear,” he said, in a feeble voice, “come here!”

“Coming, daddy,” she answered, getting out the loaves. “Want a drink? A drop of kvass?”

He did not answer.

When she had taken out all the loaves, she brought him a bowl of kvass. He did not turn towards her, and did not drink, but lay, face upwards, and began speaking without looking at her.

“Agatha,” he said, “my time has come. I am going to die. So forgive me, for Christ’s sake!”

“God will forgive you. You have done me no harm.”

He was silent awhile.

“One thing more. Go to your mother, my dear. Tell her, ‘The pilgrim’⁠ ⁠… say, ‘yesterday’s pilgrim’⁠ ⁠… say⁠ ⁠…”

He broke into sobs.

“Then have you been to my home?”

“Yes. Say, ‘Yesterday’s pilgrim⁠ ⁠… the pilgrim’⁠ ⁠… say⁠ ⁠…”

Again he broke off, sobbing; but at last, gathering strength, he finished:

“Say I wished to make peace,” he said, and began feeling on his chest for something.

“I’ll tell her⁠ ⁠… I’ll go and tell her! But what are you searching for?” said Agatha.

Without answering, the old man, frowning with the effort, drew a paper from his breast with his thin, hairy hand, and gave it to her.

“Give this to him who asks for it. It’s my soldier’s passport.⁠ ⁠… God be thanked, my sins are over now!” And his face took on a triumphant expression. His brows rose, his eyes were fixed on the ceiling, and he was quiet.

“A candle⁠ ⁠…” he uttered, without moving his lips. Agatha understood, took a half-burnt wax taper from before the icon, lit it, and put it in his hand. He held it up with his thumb.

Agatha went to put the passport in her box, and when she returned to him the candle was falling from his hand, his fixed eyes no longer saw anything, and his chest was motionless.

Agatha crossed herself, put out the candle, took a clean towel, and covered his face with it.

All that night Martha had not slept, but kept thinking about Kornéy. In the morning she put on her coat, threw a shawl over her head, and went to find out where the old man had gone to. She soon learnt that he was at Andréyevo. Martha took a stick from the fence and went towards Andréyevo. The farther she went, the more frightened she grew.

“I’ll make it up with him, and we’ll take him home. Let the sin be ended. Let him at least die at home, with his son near him,” thought she.

When Martha approached her daughter’s house, she saw a large crowd collected there. Some had entered the passage, others stood outside the windows. It had already got about that the well-known, rich Kornéy Vasílyef, who had been so much talked of in the district twenty years before, had died, a poor wanderer, in his daughter’s house. The house was full of people. The women whispered to one another, sighed and moaned.

When Martha entered, they made room for her to pass, and under the icons she saw the body⁠—already washed, laid out, and covered with a piece of linen. At its side Philip Kanónitch (who had had some education) was chanting the words of a psalm in Slavonic, in a voice like a deacon’s.

Neither to forgive nor to ask forgiveness was any longer possible; and from the stern, beautiful old face of Kornéy she could not tell whether he had forgiven her or not.

1905.

Strawberries

It was June, and the weather was hot and still. In the forest the foliage was thick, sappy and green, and only rarely did a yellow leaf fall here and there from a birch or a lime-tree. The wild-rose bushes were covered with sweet blossoms; and the forest glades were a mass of honey-scented clover. The thick, tall and waving rye was growing darker, and its grain was swelling fast. In the low-lying land the corncrakes called to one another; in the rye and the oat field quails croaked and cried noisily; in the forests at rare intervals the nightingales sang a few notes and then were again silent. The heat was dry and scorching, and the dust lay an inch thick on the road, or rose in dense clouds, blown now to left and now to right by a stray gentle breeze.

The peasants were working to finish their buildings or were carting manure. The hungry cattle were out on the dry fallow land, awaiting the aftermath in the hayfields. The cows and calves were lowing, and, with uplifted hooked tails, abandoned their shady resting-places to scamper away from the herdsmen. By the roadside and on the banks, lads were pasturing horses; women were carrying sacks of grass out of the woods; young maidens and little girls, hurrying after one another, crept between the bushes where the trees were felled, picking strawberries to sell to the gentlefolk who had come to the country for the summer.

These summer inhabitants of ornamented, architecturally pretentious bungalows, strolled with open sunshades, in light, clean, costly clothes, along sand-strewn paths; or sat in the shade of trees and arbours, by decorated tables, and, overpowered by the heat, drank tea or sipped cooling drinks.

Before the splendid bungalow of Nicholas Semyónovitch, with its tower, veranda, little balconies and galleries (everything about it fresh, new, and clean), stood a troika-calèche with three horses, that had brought a Petersburg gentleman from the town six miles off.

This gentleman⁠—a well-known and active Liberal member of every Committee⁠—was on every Council, and signed every petition and every address⁠—cunningly framed to appear faithfully loyal, but really very radical. He had come from the town (in which, as an extremely busy man, he was staying only twenty-four hours) to see the old friend and playmate of his childhood, who was almost his adherent.

They disagreed only on the best way of putting their Constitutional principles into practice; and as to that but slightly.