Part 19

"But what good can one do oneself?"...

The windows of the tavern were open, while in the pendent, undulating cloud of blue smoke that the flames of the lamps emitted, those lamps looked like so many yellow pitchers floating amid the waters of a stagnant pond. Out of doors there was brooding the quiet of an August night, and not a rustle, not a whisper was there to be heard. Hence, as numbed with melancholy, I gazed at the inky heavens and limpid stars I thought to myself:

"Surely, never were the sky and the stars meant to look down upon a life like this, a life like this?"

Suddenly someone said with the subdued assurance of a person reading aloud from a written document:

"Unless the peasants of Kubarovo keep a watch upon their timber lands, the sun will fire them tomorrow, and then the Birkins' forest also will catch alight."

For a moment the dispute died down. Then, as it were cleaving the silence, a voice said stutteringly:

"Who cares about the significance of the word 'truth'?"

And the words--heavy, jumbled, and clumsy--filled me with despondent reflections. Then again the voices rose--this time in louder and more venomous accents, and with their din recalled to me, by some accident, the foolish lines:

The gods did give men water To wash in, and to drink; Yet man has made it but a pool In which his woes to sink.

Presently I moved outside and, seating myself on the steps of the veranda, fell to contemplating the dull, blurred windows of the Archpriest's house on the other side of the square, and to watching how black shadows kept flitting to and fro behind their panes as the faint, lugubrious notes of a guitar made themselves heard. And a high-pitched, irritable voice kept repeating at intervals: "Allow me. Pray, permit me to speak," and being answered by a voice which intermittently shot into the silence, as into a bottomless sack, the words: "No, do you wait a moment, do you wait a moment."

Surrounded by the darkness, the houses looked stunted like gravestones, with a line of black trees above their roofs that loomed shadowy and cloud-like. Only in the furthest corner of the expanse was the light of a solitary street lamp bearing a resemblance to the disk of a stationary, resplendent dandelion.

Over everything was melancholy. Far from inviting was the general outlook. So much was this the case that, had, at that moment, anyone stolen upon me from behind the bushes and dealt me a sudden blow on the head, I should merely have sunk to earth without attempting to see who my assailant had been.

Often, in those days, was I in this mood, for it clave to me as faithfully as a dog--never did it wholly leave me.

"It was for men like THOSE that this fair earth of ours was bestowed upon us!" I thought to myself.

Suddenly, with a clatter, someone ran out of the door of the tavern, slid down the steps, fell headlong at their foot, quickly regained his equilibrium, and disappeared in the darkness after exclaiming in a threatening voice:

"Oh, I'LL pay you out! I'LL skin you, you damned...!"

Whereafter two figures that also appeared in the doorway said as they stood talking to one another:

"You heard him threaten to fire the place, did you not?"

"Yes, I did. But why should he want to fire it?"

"Because he is a dangerous rascal."

Presently, slinging my wallet upon my back, I pursued my onward way along a street that was fenced on either side with a tall palisade. As I proceeded, long grasses kept catching at my feet and rustling drily. And so warm was the night as to render the payment of a lodging fee superfluous; and the more so since in the neighbourhood of the cemetery, where an advanced guard of young pines had pushed forward to the cemetery wall and littered the sandy ground, with a carpet of red, dry cones, there were sleeping-places prepared in advance.

Suddenly from the darkness there emerged, to recoil again, a man's tall figure.

"Who is that? Who is it?" asked the hoarse, nervous voice of Gubin in dissipation of the deathlike stillness.

Which said, he and I fell into step with one another. As we proceeded he inquired whence I had come, and why I was still abroad. Whereafter he extended to me, as to an old acquaintance, the invitation:

"Will you come and sleep at my place? My house is near here, and as for work, I will find you a job tomorrow. In fact, as it happens, I am needing a man to help me clean out a well at the Birkins' place. Will the job suit you? Very well, then. Always I like to settle things overnight, as it is at night that I can best see through people."

The "house" turned out to be nothing more than an old one-eyed, hunchbacked washhouse or shanty which, bulging of wall, stood wedged against the clayey slope of a ravine as though it would fain bury itself amid the boughs of the neighbouring arbutus trees and elders.

Without striking a light, Gubin flung himself upon some mouldy hay that littered a threshold as narrow as the threshold of a dog-kennel, and said to me with an air of authority as he did so:

"I will sleep with my head towards the door, for the atmosphere here is a trifle confined."