Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian | Page 2

them the explanation of his perplexing position; or he
would suddenly go off into some corner, and flinging a long way off
the broom or the spade, throw himself on his face on the ground, and
lie for hours together without stirring, like a caged beast. But man gets

used to anything, and Gerasim got used at last to living in town. He had
little work to do; his whole duty consisted in keeping the courtyard
clean, bringing in a barrel of water twice a day, splitting and dragging
in wood for the kitchen and the house, keeping out strangers, and
watching at night. And it must be said he did his duty zealously. In his
courtyard there was never a shaving lying about, never a speck of dust;
if sometimes, in the muddy season, the wretched nag, put under his
charge for fetching water, got stuck in the road, he would simply give it
a shove with his shoulder, and set not only the cart but the horse itself
moving. If he set to chopping wood, the axe fairly rang like glass, and
chips and chunks flew in all directions. And as for strangers, after he
had one night caught two thieves and knocked their heads
together--knocked them so that there was not the slightest need to take
them to the police-station afterwards--every one in the neighborhood
began to feel a great respect for him; even those who came in the
daytime, by no means robbers, but simply unknown persons, at the
sight of the terrible porter, waved and shouted to him as though he
could hear their shouts. With all the rest of the servants, Gerasim was
on terms hardly friendly--they were afraid of him--but familiar; he
regarded them as his fellows. They explained themselves to him by
signs, and he understood them, and exactly carried out all orders, but
knew his own rights too, and soon no one dared to take his seat at the
table. Gerasim was altogether of a strict and serious temper, he liked
order in everything; even the cocks did not dare to fight in his presence,
or woe betide them! Directly he caught sight of them, he would seize
them by the legs, swing them ten times round in the air like a wheel,
and throw them in different directions. There were geese, too, kept in
the yard; but the goose, as is well known, is a dignified and reasonable
bird: Gerasim felt a respect for them, looked after them, and fed them;
he was himself not unlike a gander of the steppes. He was assigned a
little garret over the kitchen; he arranged it himself to his own liking,
made a bedstead in it of oak boards on four stumps of wood for legs--a
truly Titanic bedstead; one might have put a ton or two on it--it would
not have bent under the load; under the bed was a solid chest; in a
corner stood a little table of the same strong kind, and near the table a
three-legged stool, so solid and squat that Gerasim himself would
sometimes pick it up and drop it again with a smile of delight. The

garret was locked up by means of a padlock that looked like a kalatch
or basket-shaped loaf, only black; the key of this padlock Gerasim
always carried about him in his girdle. He did not like people to come
to his garret.
So passed a year, at the end of which a little incident befell Gerasim.
The old lady, in whose service he lived as porter, adhered in everything
to the ancient ways, and kept a large number of servants. In her house
were not only laundresses, sempstresses, carpenters, tailors and
tailoresses, there was even a harness-maker--he was reckoned as a
veterinary surgeon, too,--and a doctor for the servants; there was a
household doctor for the mistress; there was, lastly, a shoemaker, by
name Kapiton Klimov, a sad drunkard. Klimov regarded himself as an
injured creature, whose merits were unappreciated, a cultivated man
from Petersburg, who ought not to be living in Moscow without
occupation--in the wilds, so to speak; and if he drank, as he himself
expressed it emphatically, with a blow on his chest, it was sorrow drove
him to it. So one day his mistress had a conversation about him with
her head steward, Gavrila, a man whom, judging solely from his little
yellow eyes and nose like a duck's beak, fate itself, it seemed, had
marked out as a person in authority. The lady expressed her regret at
the corruption of the morals of Kapiton, who had, only the evening
before, been picked up somewhere in the street.
"Now, Gavrila," she observed, all of a sudden, "now, if we were to
marry him, what do you think,