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."
And, true enough, the place reeked of elderberries, soap, burnt stuff, and decayed leaves. I could not conceive why I had come to such a spot.
The twisted branches of the neighbouring trees hung motionless athwart the sky, and concealed from view the golden dust of the Milky Way, while across the Oka an owl kept screeching, and the strange, arresting remarks of my companion pelted me like showers of peas.
"Do not be surprised that I should live in a remote ravine," he said. "I, whose hand is against every man, can at least feel lord of what I survey here."
Too dark was it for me to see my host's face, but my memory recalled his bald cranium, and the yellow light of the lamps falling upon a nose as long as a woodpecker's beak, a pair of grey and stubbly cheeks, a pair of thin lips covered by a bristling moustache, a mouth sharp-cut as with a knife, and full of black, evil-looking stumps, a pair of pointed, sensitive, mouse-like ears, and a clean-shaven chin. The last feature in no way consorted with his visage, or with his whole appearance; but at least it rendered him worthy of remark, and enabled one to realise that one had to deal with neither a peasant nor a soldier nor a tradesman, but with a man peculiar to himself. Also, his frame was lanky, with long arms and legs, and pointed knees and elbows. In fact, so like a piece of string was his body that to twist it round and round, or even to tie it into a knot, would, seemingly, have been easy enough.
For awhile I found his speech difficult to follow; wherefore, silently I gazed at the sky, where the stars appeared to be playing at follow-my-leader.
"Are you asleep?" at length he inquired.
"No, I am not. Why do you shave your beard?"
"Why do you ask?"
"Because, if you will pardon me, I think your face would look better bearded."
With a short laugh he exclaimed:
"Bearded? Ah, sloven! Bearded, indeed!"
To which he added more gravely:
"Both Peter the Great and Nicholas I were wiser than you, for they ordained that whosoever should be bearded should have his nose slit, and be fined a hundred roubles. Did you ever hear of that?"
"No."
"And from the same source, from the beard, arose also the Great Schism."
His manner of speaking was too rapid to be articulate, and, in leaving his mouth, his words caused his lips to bare stumps and gums amid which they lost their way, became disintegrated, and issued, as it were, in an incomplete state.
"Everyone," he continued, "knows that life is lived more easily with a beard than without one, since with a beard lies are more easily told – they can be told, and then hidden in the masses of hair. Hence we ought to go through life with our faces naked, since such faces render untruthfulness more difficult, and prevent their owners from prevaricating without the fact becoming plain to all."
"But what about women?"
"What about women? Well, women can always lie to their husbands successfully, but not to all the town, to all the world, to folk in general. Moreover, since a woman's real business in life is the same as that of the hen, to rear young, what can it matter if she DOES cackle a few falsehoods, provided that she be neither a priest nor a mayor nor a tchinovnik, and does not possess any authority, and cannot establish laws? For the really important point is that the law itself should not lie, but ever uphold truth pure and simple. Long has the prevalent illegality disgusted me."
The door of the shanty was standing open, and amid the outer darkness, as in a church, the trees looked like pillars, and the white stems of the birches like silver candelabra tipped with a thousand lights, or dimly-seen choristers with faces showing pale above sacramental vestments of black.