A station was being built four miles from the town. It was said that the engineers asked for a bribe14 of fifty thousand roubles for bringing the line right up to the town, but the town council would only consent to give forty thousand; they could not come to an agreement over the difference, and now the townspeople regretted it, as they had to make a road to the station and that, it was reckoned, would cost more. The sleepers15 and rails had been laid throughout the whole length of the line, and trains ran up and down it, bringing building materials and labourers, and further progress was only delayed on account of the bridges which Dolzhikov was building, and some of the stations were not yet finished.
Dubetchnya, as our first station was called, was a little under twelve miles from the town. I walked. The cornfields, bathed in the morning sunshine, were bright green. It was a flat, cheerful country, and in the distance there were the distinct outlines of the station, of ancient barrows, and far-away homesteads. . . . How nice it was out there in the open! And how I longed to be filled with the sense of freedom, if only for that one morning, that I might not think of what was being done in the town, not think of my needs, not feel hungry! Nothing has so marred16 my existence as an acute feeling of hunger, which made images of buckwheat porridge, rissoles, and baked fish mingle17 strangely with my best thoughts. Here I was standing18 alone in the open country, gazing upward at a lark19 which hovered20 in the air at the same spot, trilling as though in hysterics, and meanwhile I was thinking: “How nice it would be to eat a piece of bread and butter!”
Or I would sit down by the roadside to rest, and shut my eyes to listen to the delicious sounds of May, and what haunted me was the smell of hot potatoes. Though I was tall and strongly built, I had as a rule little to eat, and so the predominant sensation throughout the day was hunger, and perhaps that was why I knew so well how it is that such multitudes of people toil21 merely for their daily bread, and can talk of nothing but things to eat.
At Dubetchnya they were plastering the inside of the station, and building a wooden upper storey to the pumping shed. It was hot; there was a smell of lime, and the workmen sauntered listlessly between the heaps of shavings and mortar22 rubble23. The pointsman lay asleep near his sentry24 box, and the sun was blazing full on his face. There was not a single tree. The telegraph wire hummed faintly and hawks25 were perching on it here and there. I, wandering, too, among the heaps of rubbish, and not knowing what to do, recalled how the engineer, in answer to my question what my duties would consist in, had said: “We shall see when you are there”; but what could one see in that wilderness26?
The plasterers spoke27 of the foreman, and of a certain Fyodot Vasilyev. I did not understand, and gradually I was overcome by depression —the physical depression in which one is conscious of one’s arms and legs and huge body, and does not know what to do with them or where to put them.
After I had been walking about for at least a couple of hours, I noticed that there were telegraph poles running off to the right from the station, and that they ended a mile or a mile and a half away at a white stone wall. The workmen told me the office was there, and at last I reflected that that was where I ought to go.
It was a very old manor28 house, deserted29 long ago. The wall round it, of porous30 white stone, was mouldering31 and had fallen away in places, and the lodge32, the blank wall of which looked out on the open country, had a rusty33 roof with patches of tin-plate gleaming here and there on it. Within the gates could be seen a spacious35 courtyard overgrown with rough weeds, and an old manor house with sunblinds on the windows, and a high roof red with rust34. Two lodges36, exactly alike, stood one on each side of the house to right and to left: one had its windows nailed up with boards; near the other, of which the windows were open, there was washing on the line, and there were calves37 moving about. The last of the telegraph poles stood in the courtyard, and the wire from it ran to the window of the lodge, of which the blank wall looked out into the open country. The door stood open; I went in. By the telegraph apparatus38 a gentleman with a curly dark head, wearing a reefer coat made of sailcloth, was sitting at a table; he glanced at me morosely39 from under his brows, but immediately smiled and said:
“Hullo, Better-than-nothing!”
It was Ivan Tcheprakov, an old schoolfellow of mine, who had been expelled from the second class for smoking. We used at one time, during autumn, to catch goldfinches, finches, and linnets together, and to sell them in the market early in the morning, while our parents were still in their beds. We watched for flocks of migrating starlings and shot at them with small shot, then we picked up those that were wounded, and some of them died in our hands in terrible agonies (I remember to this day how they moaned in the cage at night); those that recovered we sold, and swore with the utmost effrontery40 that they were all cocks. On one occasion at the market I had only one starling left, which I had offered to purchasers in vain, till at last I sold it for a farthing. “Anyway, it’s better than nothing,” I said to comfort myself, as I put the farthing in my pocket, and from that day the street urchins41 and the schoolboys called after me: “Better-than-nothing”; and to this day the street boys and the shopkeepers mock at me with the nickname, though no one remembers how it arose.
Tcheprakov was not of robust42 constitution: he was narrow-chested, round-shouldered, and long-legged. He wore a silk cord for a tie, had no trace of a waistcoat, and his boots were worse than mine, with the heels trodden down on one side. He stared, hardly even blinking, with a strained expression, as though he were just going to catch something, and he was always in a fuss.
“You wait a minute,” he would say fussily43. “You listen. . . . Whatever was I talking about?”
We got into conversation. I learned that the estate on which I now was had until recently been the property of the Tcheprakovs, and had only the autumn before passed into the possession of Dolzhikov, who considered it more profitable to put his money into land than to keep it in notes, and had already bought up three good-sized mortgaged estates in our neighbourhood. At the sale Tcheprakov’s mother had reserved for herself the right to live for the next two years in one of the lodges at the side, and had obtained a post for her son in the office.
“I should think he could buy!” Tcheprakov said of the engineer. “See what he fleeces out of the contractors44 alone! He fleeces everyone!”
Then he took me to dinner, deciding fussily that I should live with him in the lodge, and have my meals from his mother.
“She is a bit stingy,” he said, “but she won’t charge you much.”
It was very cramped45 in the little rooms in which his mother lived; they were all, even the passage and the entry, piled up with furniture which had been brought from the big house after the sale; and the furniture was all old-fashioned mahogany. Madame Tcheprakov, a very stout46 middle-aged47 lady with slanting48 Chinese eyes, was sitting in a big arm-chair by the window, knitting a stocking. She received me ceremoniously.
“This is Poloznev, mamma,” Tcheprakov introduced me. “He is going to serve here.”
“Are you a nobleman?” she asked in a strange, disagreeable voice: it seemed to me to sound as though fat were bubbling in her throat.
“Yes,” I answered.
“Sit down.”
The dinner was a poor one. Nothing was served but pies filled with bitter curd49, and milk soup. Elena Nikiforovna, who presided, kept blinking in a queer way, first with one eye and then with the other. She talked, she ate, but yet there was something deathly about her whole figure, and one almost fancied the faint smell of a corpse50. There was only a glimmer51 of life in her, a glimmer of consciousness that she had been a lady who had once had her own serfs, that she was the widow of a general whom the servants had to address as “your Excellency”; and when these feeble relics52 of life flickered53 up in her for an instant she would say to her son:
“Jean, you are not holding your knife properly!”
Or she would say to me, drawing a deep breath, with the mincing54 air of a hostess trying to entertain a visitor:
“You know we have sold our estate. Of course, it is a pity, we are used to the place, but Dolzhikov has promised to make Jean stationmaster of Dubetchnya, so we shall not have to go away; we shall live here at the station, and that is just the same as being on our own property! The engineer is so nice! Don’t you think he is very handsome?”
Until recently the Tcheprakovs had lived in a wealthy style, but since the death of the general everything had been changed. Elena Nikiforovna had taken to quarrelling with the neighbours, to going to law, and to not paying her bailiffs or her labourers; she was in constant terror of being robbed, and in some ten years Dubetchnya had become unrecognizable.
Behind the great house was an old garden which had already run wild, and was overgrown with rough weeds and bushes. I walked up and down the verandah, which was still solid and beautiful; through the glass doors one could see a room with parquetted floor, probably the drawing-room; an old-fashioned piano and pictures in deep mahogany frames—there was nothing else. In the old flower-beds all that remained were peonies and poppies, which lifted their white and bright red heads above the grass. Young maples55 and elms, already nibbled56 by the cows, grew beside the paths, drawn57 up and hindering each other’s growth. The garden was thickly overgrown and seemed impassable, but this was only near the house where there stood poplars, fir-trees, and old limetrees, all of the same age, relics of the former avenues. Further on, beyond them the garden had been cleared for the sake of hay, and here it was not moist and stuffy58, and there were no spiders’ webs in one’s mouth and eyes. A light breeze was blowing. The further one went the more open it was, and here in the open space were cherries, plums, and spreading apple-trees, disfigured by props59 and by canker; and pear-trees so tall that one could not believe they were pear-trees. This part of the garden was let to some shopkeepers of the town, and it was protected from thieves and starlings by a feeble-minded peasant who lived in a shanty60 in it.
The garden, growing more and more open, till it became definitely a meadow, sloped down to the river, which was overgrown with green weeds and osiers. Near the milldam was the millpond, deep and full of fish; a little mill with a thatched roof was working away with a wrathful sound, and frogs croaked61 furiously. Circles passed from time to time over the smooth, mirror-like water, and the water-lilies trembled, stirred by the lively fish. On the further side of the river was the little village Dubetchnya. The still, blue millpond was alluring62 with its promise of coolness and peace. And now all this—the millpond and the mill and the snug-looking banks— belonged to the engineer!
And so my new work began. I received and forwarded telegrams, wrote various reports, and made fair copies of the notes of requirements, the complaints, and the reports sent to the office by the illiterate63 foremen and workmen. But for the greater part of the day I did nothing but walk about the room waiting for telegrams, or made a boy sit in the lodge while I went for a walk in the garden, until the boy ran to tell me that there was a tapping at the operating machine. I had dinner at Madame Tcheprakov’s. Meat we had very rarely: our dishes were all made of milk, and Wednesdays and Fridays were fast days, and on those days we had pink plates which were called Lenten plates. Madame Tcheprakov was continually blinking —it was her invariable habit, and I always felt ill at ease in her presence.
As there was not enough work in the lodge for one, Tcheprakov did nothing, but simply dozed64, or went with his gun to shoot ducks on the millpond. In the evenings he drank too much in the village or the station, and before going to bed stared in the looking-glass and said: “Hullo, Ivan Tcheprakov.”
When he was drunk he was very pale, and kept rubbing his hands and laughing with a sound like a neigh: “hee-hee-hee!” By way of bravado65 he used to strip and run about the country naked. He used to eat flies and say they were rather sour.
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1
thronged
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| v.成群，挤满( throng的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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ragged
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| adj.衣衫褴褛的，粗糙的，刺耳的 | |
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3
countenance
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| n.脸色，面容；面部表情；vt.支持，赞同 | |
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4
linen
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| n.亚麻布，亚麻线，亚麻制品；adj.亚麻布制的，亚麻的 | |
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congregated
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| （使）集合，聚集( congregate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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taverns
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| n.小旅馆，客栈，酒馆( tavern的名词复数 ) | |
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7
shrill
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| adj.尖声的；刺耳的；v尖叫 | |
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rabble
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| n.乌合之众，暴民；下等人 | |
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9
kerosene
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| n.(kerosine)煤油，火油 | |
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10
hue
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| n.色度；色调；样子 | |
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11
jingling
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| 叮当声 | |
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squealing
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| v.长声尖叫，用长而尖锐的声音说( squeal的现在分词 ) | |
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13
exhausted
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| adj.极其疲惫的，精疲力尽的 | |
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14
bribe
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| n.贿赂；v.向…行贿，买通 | |
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15
sleepers
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| n.卧铺（通常以复数形式出现）；卧车( sleeper的名词复数 )；轨枕；睡觉（呈某种状态）的人；小耳环 | |
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16
marred
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| adj. 被损毁, 污损的 | |
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17
mingle
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| vt.使混合，使相混；vi.混合起来；相交往 | |
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18
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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19
lark
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| n.云雀，百灵鸟；n.嬉戏，玩笑；vi.嬉戏 | |
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20
hovered
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| 鸟( hover的过去式和过去分词 )； 靠近（某事物）； （人）徘徊； 犹豫 | |
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21
toil
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| vi.辛劳工作，艰难地行动；n.苦工，难事 | |
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22
mortar
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| n.灰浆，灰泥；迫击炮；v.把…用灰浆涂接合 | |
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23
rubble
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| n.（一堆）碎石，瓦砾 | |
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24
sentry
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| n.哨兵，警卫 | |
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hawks
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| 鹰( hawk的名词复数 )； 鹰派人物，主战派人物 | |
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26
wilderness
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| n.杳无人烟的一片陆地、水等，荒漠 | |
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27
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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28
manor
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| n.庄园，领地 | |
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29
deserted
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| adj.荒芜的，荒废的，无人的，被遗弃的 | |
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30
porous
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| adj.可渗透的，多孔的 | |
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31
mouldering
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| v.腐朽( moulder的现在分词 )；腐烂，崩塌 | |
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32
lodge
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| v.临时住宿，寄宿，寄存，容纳；n.传达室，小旅馆 | |
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33
rusty
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| adj.生锈的；锈色的；荒废了的 | |
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34
rust
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| n.锈；v.生锈；(脑子)衰退 | |
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35
spacious
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| adj.广阔的，宽敞的 | |
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36
lodges
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| v.存放( lodge的第三人称单数 )；暂住；埋入；（权利、权威等）归属 | |
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37
calves
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| n.(calf的复数)笨拙的男子，腓；腿肚子( calf的名词复数 )；牛犊；腓；小腿肚v.生小牛( calve的第三人称单数 )；（冰川）崩解；生（小牛等），产（犊）；使（冰川）崩解 | |
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38
apparatus
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| n.装置，器械；器具，设备 | |
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39
morosely
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| adv.愁眉苦脸地，忧郁地 | |
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40
effrontery
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| n.厚颜无耻 | |
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41
urchins
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| n.顽童( urchin的名词复数 )；淘气鬼；猬；海胆 | |
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42
robust
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| adj.强壮的，强健的，粗野的，需要体力的，浓的 | |
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43
fussily
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| adv.无事空扰地，大惊小怪地，小题大做地 | |
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44
contractors
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| n.（建筑、监造中的）承包人( contractor的名词复数 ) | |
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45
cramped
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| a.狭窄的 | |
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47
middle-aged
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| adj.中年的 | |
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48
slanting
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| 倾斜的，歪斜的 | |
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49
curd
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| n.凝乳；凝乳状物 | |
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50
corpse
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| n.尸体，死尸 | |
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51
glimmer
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| v.发出闪烁的微光；n.微光，微弱的闪光 | |
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52
relics
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| [pl.］n.遗物，遗迹，遗产；遗体，尸骸 | |
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53
flickered
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| （通常指灯光）闪烁，摇曳( flicker的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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54
mincing
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| adj.矫饰的；v.切碎；切碎 | |
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55
maples
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| 槭树，枫树( maple的名词复数 )； 槭木 | |
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56
nibbled
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| v.啃，一点一点地咬（吃）( nibble的过去式和过去分词 )；啃出（洞），一点一点咬出（洞）；慢慢减少；小口咬 | |
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57
drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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58
stuffy
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| adj.不透气的，闷热的 | |
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59
props
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| 小道具； 支柱( prop的名词复数 )； 支持者； 道具； （橄榄球中的）支柱前锋 | |
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60
shanty
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| n.小屋，棚屋；船工号子 | |
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61
croaked
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| v.呱呱地叫( croak的过去式和过去分词 )；用粗的声音说 | |
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62
alluring
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| adj.吸引人的，迷人的 | |
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63
illiterate
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| adj.文盲的；无知的；n.文盲 | |
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64
dozed
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| v.打盹儿，打瞌睡( doze的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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65
bravado
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| n.虚张声势，故作勇敢，逞能 | |
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