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THE RIVER OF LIFE




  THE RIVER OF LIFE

  AND OTHER STORIES

  BY

  ALEXANDER KUPRIN

  TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN BY
  S. KOTELIANSKY AND J. M. MURRY


  JOHN W. LUCE AND COMPANY
  BOSTON
  1916




INTRODUCTORY NOTE


Alexander Kuprin was born in 1870. He attended the Cadet School and
the Military College at Moscow, and entered the Russian Army as a
lieutenant in 1890. Seven years later he resigned his commission to
devote himself to literature.

He achieved fame by a novel, _The Duel_, in which he described with
a ruthless realism the army life in a garrison town upon the Western
Frontier. The book, which in reality falls into line with the rest of
his work as a severely objective presentation of a life which he has
found vivid and rich, was, fortunately for his success, interpreted
as an indictment of the Russian Army and the ill-starred Manchurian
campaign. He was accepted by the propagandists as one of themselves,
and though he protested vigorously against his unsought reputation, his
position was thenceforward assured.

But the interest of Kuprin’s talent is independent of the accidents
of his material. He is an artist who has found life wide and rich and
inexhaustible. He has been fascinated by the reality itself rather
than by the problems with which it confronts a differently sensitive
mind. Therefore he has not held himself aloof, but plunged into the
riotous waters of the River of Life. He has swum with the stream and
battled against it as the mood turned in him; and he has emerged with
stories of the joy he has found in his own eager acceptance. Thus
Kuprin is alive as none of his contemporaries is alive, and his stories
are stories told for the delight of the telling and of the tale.
They may not be profound with the secrets of the universe; but they
are, within their compass, shaped by the perfect art of one to whom
the telling of a story of life is an exercise of his whole being in
complete harmony with the act of life itself.

                                                  J. M. M.




CONTENTS


                      PAGE
  THE RIVER OF LIFE      1


             II

  CAPTAIN RIBNIKOV      37


             III

  THE OUTRAGE           99


             IV

  THE WITCH            127




I

THE RIVER OF LIFE


I

The landlady’s room in the ‘Serbia.’ Yellow wallpaper; two windows
with dirty muslin curtains; between them an oval squinting mirror,
stuck at an angle of forty-five degrees, reflects a painted floor and
chair legs; on the window-sills dusty, pimply cactuses; a cage with
a canary hangs from the ceiling. The room is partitioned off by red
screens of printed calico: the smaller part on the left is the bedroom
of the landlady and her children; that on the right is blocked up with
varied odds and ends of furniture--bedridden, rickety, and lame. In the
corners all kinds of rubbish are in chaotic cobwebbed heaps: a sextant
in a ginger leather case, and with it a tripod and a chain, some old
trunks and boxes, a guitar without strings, hunting boots, a sewing
machine, a ‘Monopan’ musical box, a camera, about five lamps, piles of
books, dresses, bundles of linen, and a great many things besides. All
these things had been detained at various times by the landlady for
rent unpaid, or left behind by runaway lodgers. You cannot move in the
room because of them.

The ‘Serbia’ is a third-rate hotel. Permanent lodgers are a rarity, and
those are prostitutes. Mostly they are casual passengers who float
up to town on the Dnieper: small farmers, Jewish commission agents,
distant provincials, pilgrims, and village priests who come to town to
inform, or are returning home when the information has been lodged.
Rooms in the ‘Serbia’ are also occupied by couples from the town for
the night or a few days.

Spring. About three in the afternoon. The curtains of the open windows
stir gently, and the room smells of kerosene and baked cabbage. It
is the landlady warming up on her stove a _bigoss à la Polonaise_ of
cabbage, pork fat, and sausage, with a great deal of pepper and bay
leaves. She is a widow between thirty-six and forty, a strong, quick,
good-looking woman. The hair that she wears in curls over her forehead
has a strong tinge of grey; but her face is fresh, her big sensual
mouth red, and her young dark eyes moist and playfully sly. Her name
is Anna Friedrichovna. She is half German, half Pole, and comes from
the Baltic Provinces; but her close friends call her Friedrich simply,
which suits her determined character better. She is quick-tempered,
scolds and talks bawdy. Sometimes she fights with her porters and the
lodgers who have been on the spree; she drinks as well as any man, and
has a mad passion for dancing. She changes from abuse to laughing in a
second. She has but small respect for the law, receives lodgers without
passports, and with her own hands, as she says, ‘chucks into the
street’ those who don’t pay up--that is, she unlocks his door while
he is out, and puts all his things in the passage or on the stairs,
and sometimes in her own room. The police are friendly with her for
her hospitality, her cheerful character, and particularly for the gay,
easy, unceremonious, disinterested complaisance with which she responds
to man’s passing emotions.

She has four children. The two eldest, Romka and Alychka, have not yet
come back from school, and the younger, Adka, seven, and Edka, five,
strong brats with cheeks mottled with mud, blotches, tear-stains, and
the sunburn of early spring, are always to be found near their mother.
Both of them hold on to the table leg and beg. They are perpetually
hungry, because their mother does not pay much attention to food; they
eat anyhow, at different times, sending into a little general shop for
anything they want. Sticking out his lips in a circle, frowning, and
looking out under his forehead, Adka roars in a loud bass: ‘That’s what
you’re like. You won’t give me a taste.’ ‘Let me try,’ Edka speaks
through his nose, scratching his calf with his bare foot.

At the table by the window sits Lieutenant Valerian Ivanovich
Tchijhevich of the Army Reserve. Before him is the register, in which
he enters the lodgers’ passports. But after yesterday’s affair the
work goes badly; the letters wave about and crawl away. His trembling
fingers quarrel with the pen. There is a roaring in his ears like the
telegraph poles in autumn. At times it seems to him that his head is
beginning to swell, to swell... and the table, the book, the inkstand,
and the lieutenant’s hand go terribly far away and become quite tiny.
Then again the book comes up to his very eyes, the inkstand grows and
repeats itself, and his head grows small, turns to queer strange sizes.

Lieutenant Tchijhevich’s appearance speaks of former beauty and lost
position; his black hair bristles, and a bald patch shows on the nape
of his neck. His beard is fashionably trimmed to a sharp point. His
face is lean, dirty, pale, dissipated. On it is, as it were written,
the full history of the lieutenant’s obvious weaknesses and secret
diseases.

His situation in the ‘Serbia’ is complicated. He goes to the
magistrates on Anna Friedrichovna’s behalf. He hears the children’s
lessons and teaches them deportment, keeps the house register, makes
out the lodgers’ accounts, reads the newspaper aloud in the morning
and talks of politics. He usually sleeps in one of the vacant rooms
and, in case of an influx of guests, in the passage on an ancient sofa,
whose springs and stuffing stick out together. When this happens the
lieutenant carefully hangs all his property on nails above the sofa:
his overcoat, cap, his morning coat, shiny with age and white in the
seams but tolerably clean, a ‘Monopole’ paper collar, an officer’s cap
with a blue band; but he puts his notebook and his handkerchief with
some one else’s initials under his pillow.

The widow keeps her lieutenant under her thumb. ‘Marry me and I’ll
do anything for you,’ she promises. ‘Full equipment, all the linen
you want, a fine pair of boots and goloshes as well. You’ll have
everything, and on holidays I’ll let you wear my late husband’s watch
with the chain.’ But the lieutenant is still thinking about it. He
values his freedom, and sets high store by his former dignity as an
officer. However, he is wearing out some of the older portions of the
deceased’s linen.


II

From time to time storms break out in the landlady’s room. Sometimes
it happens that the lieutenant, with the assistance of his pupil
Romka, sells a heap of somebody else’s books to a second-hand dealer.
Sometimes he takes advantage of the landlady’s absence to intercept
the payment for a room by day. Or he secretly begins to have playful
relations with the servant-maid. Just the other day the lieutenant
abused Anna Friedrichovna’s credit in the public-house over the way.
This came to light, and a quarrel raged, with abuse and a fight in the
corridor. The doors of all the rooms opened, and men and women poked
their heads out in curiosity. Anna Friedrichovna shouted so loud that
she was heard in the street:

‘You get out of here, you blackguard, get out, you tramp! I’ve spent on
you every penny of the money I’ve earned by sweating blood. You fill
your belly with the farthings I sweat for my children!’

‘You fill your belly with our farthings,’ squalled the schoolboy Romka,
making faces at him from behind his mother’s skirt.

‘You fill your belly!’ Adka and Edka accompanied from a distance.

Arseny the porter, in stony silence, pressed his chest against the
lieutenant. From room No. 9, the valiant possessor of a magnificently
parted black beard leaned out to his waist in his underclothes, with a
round hat for some reason perched on his head, and resolutely gave his
advice:

‘Arseny, give him one between the eyes.’

Thus the lieutenant was driven to the stairs; but there was a broad
window opening on to these very stairs from the corridor. Anna
Friedrichovna hung out of it and still went on shouting after the
lieutenant:

‘You dirty beast... you murderer... scoundrel... Kiev
gutter-sweeping!’

‘Gutter-sweeping!’ ‘Gutter-sweeping!’ the brats in the corridor
strained their voices, shouting.

‘Don’t come eating here any more! Take your filthy things away with
you. Take them. Take them!’

The things the lieutenant had left upstairs in his haste descended on
him: a stick, his paper collar, and his notebook. The lieutenant halted
on the bottom stair, raised his head, and brandished his fist. His face
was pale, a bruise showed red beneath his left eye.

‘You just wait, you scum. I tell everything in the proper quarter. Ah!
ah.... They’re a lot of pimps, robbing the lodgers!’

‘You just sling your hook while you’ve got a whole skin,’ said Arseny
sternly, pressing on the lieutenant from behind and pushing him with
his shoulder.

‘Get away, you swine! You’ve not the right to lay a finger on an
officer,’ the lieutenant proudly exclaimed. ‘I know about everything!
You let people in here without passports! You receive--you receive
stolen goods.... You keep a broth----’

At this point Arseny seized the lieutenant adroitly from behind. The
door slammed with a shattering noise. The two men rolled out into the
street together like a ball, and thence came an angry: ‘Brothel!’

This morning, as it had always happened before, Lieutenant Tchijhevich
came back penitent, with a bouquet of lilac torn out of somebody’s
garden. His face was weary. A dim blue surrounded his hollow eyes. His
forehead was yellow, his clothes unbrushed, and there were feathers in
his hair. The reconciliation goes slowly. Anna Friedrichovna hasn’t
yet had her fill of her lover’s submissive look and repentant words.
Besides, she is a little jealous of the three nights her Valerian has
passed, she knows not where.

‘Anna, darling,... where...’ the lieutenant began in an
extraordinarily meek and tender falsetto, slightly tremulous even.

‘Wha-at! Who’s Anna darling, I’d like to know,’ the landlady
contemptuously cut him short. ‘I’m not Anna darling to any scum of a
road sweeper!’

‘But I only wanted to ask what address I was to write for “Praskovia
Uvertiesheva, 34 years old,” there’s nothing written down here.’

‘Put her down at the Rag-market, and put yourself there, too. You’re a
pretty pair. Or put yourself in a doss-house.’

‘Dirty beast,’ thinks the lieutenant, but he only gives a deep,
submissive sigh. ‘You’re very nervous to-day, Anna, darling!’

‘Nervous! Whatever I am, I know I’m an honest, hard-working woman....
Get out of the way, you bastards,’ she shouts at the children, and
suddenly, ‘Shlop, shlop’--two well-aimed smacks with the spoon come
down on Adka’s and Edka’s foreheads. The boys begin to snivel.

‘There’s a curse on my business, and on me,’ the landlady growls
angrily. ‘When I lived with my husband I never had any sorrows. Now,
all the porters are drunkards, and all the maids are thieves. Sh! you
cursed brats!... That Proska... she hasn’t been here two days when she
steals the stockings from the girl in No. 12. Other people go off to
pubs with other people’s money, and never do a stroke....’

The lieutenant knew perfectly who Anna Friedrichovna was speaking
about, but he maintained a concentrated silence. The smell of the
_bigoss_ inspired him with some faint hopes. Then the door opened and
Arseny the porter entered without taking off his hat with the three
gold braids. He looks like an Albino eunuch, and his dirty face is
pitted. This is at least the fortieth time he has had this place with
Anna Friedrichovna. He keeps it until the first fit of drinking, when
the landlady herself beats him and puts him into the streets, first
having taken away the symbol of his authority, his three-braided cap.

Then Arseny puts a white Caucasian fur hat on his head and a dark blue
pince-nez on his nose, and swaggers in the public-house opposite until
he’s drunk everything on him away, and at the end of his spree he will
cry on the bosom of the indifferent waiter about his hopeless love for
Friedrich and threaten to murder Lieutenant Tchijhevich. When he sobers
down he comes to the ‘Serbia’ and falls at his landlady’s feet. And
she takes him back again, because the porter who succeeded Arseny had
already managed in this short time to steal from her, to get drunk, to
make a row and be taken off to the police station.

‘You... have you come from the steamer?’ Anna Friedrichovna asked.

‘Yes. I’ve brought half a dozen pilgrims. It was a job to get ’em away
from Jacob--the “Commercial.” He was just leading them off, when I
comes up to him and says, “It’s all the same to me, I says, go wherever
you like. But as there are people who don’t know these places, and I’m
very sorry for you, I tell you straight you’d better not go with that
man. In their hotel last week they put some powder in a pilgrim’s food
and robbed him.” So I got them away. Afterwards Jacob shook his fist at
me in the distance, and called out: “You just wait, Arseny. I’ll get
you. You won’t get away from me!” But when that happens, I’ll do it
myself....’

‘All right,’ the landlady interrupted. ‘I don’t care twopence about
your Jacob. What price did you fix?’

‘Thirty kopeks. I did my best, but I couldn’t make them give more.’

‘You fool. You can’t do anything.... Give them No. 2.’

‘All in the one room?’

‘You fool. Two rooms, each.... Of course, all in one room. Bring three
mattresses from the old ones, and tell them that they’re not to lie on
the sofa. These pilgrims have always got bugs. Get along!’

When he had gone the lieutenant said in a tender and solicitous
undertone: ‘Anna, darling, I wonder why you allow him to enter the
room in his hat. It is disrespectful to you, both as a lady and
proprietress. And then--consider my position. I’m an officer in
Reserve, and he is a private. It’s rather awkward.’

But Anna Friedrichovna leapt upon him in fresh exasperation: ‘Don’t you
poke your nose in where it’s not wanted. Of-ficer indeed! There are
plenty of officers like you spending the night in a shelter. Arseny’s
a working man. He earns his bread... not like.... Get away, you lazy
brats, take your hands away!’

‘Ye-es, but give us something to eat,’ roars Adka.

‘Give us something to eat....’

Meanwhile the _bigoss_ is ready. Anna Friedrichovna clatters the dishes
on the table. The lieutenant keeps his head busily down over the
register. He is completely absorbed in his business.

‘Well, sit down,’ the landlady abruptly invited him.

‘No thanks, Anna, darling. Eat, yourself. I’m not very keen,’
Tchijhevich said, without turning round, in a stifled voice, loudly
swallowing.

‘You do what you are told.... He’s giving himself airs, too.... Come
on!’

‘Immediately, this very minute. I’ll just finish the last page. “The
certificate issued by the Bilden Rural District Council... of the
province... number 2039....” Ready.’ The lieutenant rose and rubbed
his hands. ‘I love working.’

‘H’m. You call that work,’ the landlady snorted in disdain. ‘Sit down.’

‘Anna, darling, just one... little....’

‘You can manage without.’

But since peace is already almost restored, Anna Friedrichovna takes a
small, fat-bodied cut-glass decanter from the cupboard, out of which
the deceased’s father used to drink. Adka spreads his cabbage all over
his plate and teases his brother because he has more. Edka is upset and
screams:

‘Adka’s got more. You gave him----’

Shlop! Edka gets a sounding smack with the spoon upon his forehead.
Immediately Anna Friedrichovna continues the conversation as if nothing
had happened:

‘Tell us another of your lies. I bet you were with some woman.’

‘Anna, darling!’ the lieutenant exclaimed reproachfully. Then he
stopped eating and pressed his hands--in one of which was a fork with a
piece of sausage--to his chest. ‘I... oh, how little you know me. I’d
rather have my head cut off than let such a thing happen. When I went
away that time, I felt so bitter, so hard! I just walked in the street,
and you can imagine, I was drowned in tears. My God,’ I thought, ‘and
I’ve let myself insult that woman--the one woman whom I love sacredly,
madly....’

‘That’s a