Short Fiction by Leo Tolstoy (book reader for pc TXT) 📕

from both veins, “for greater lightness,” and began hammering in the blunt lancet with a mallet; then he bandaged the innkeeper’s horse under its belly with the selvedge torn from his wife’s shawl, and at last he began to sprinkle all sorts of sores with vitriol, to drench them with something out of a bottle, and sometimes to give internally whatever came into his head. And the more horses he tormented and killed, the more he was believed in, and the more of them were brought to him.

I feel that for us educated people it would hardly be proper to laugh at Polikéy. The methods he employed are the same that have influenced our fathers, that influence us, and will influence our children. The peasant lying prone on the head of his one mare (which not only constitutes the whole of his wealth, but is almost one of his family) and gazing with faith and horror at Polikéy’s frowning look of importance and thin arms with upturned sleeves, as, with the healing rag or a bottle of vitriol between his teeth, the latter presses the sore place and boldly cuts into the living flesh (with the secret thought, “The one-eyed brute will never get over it!”) and at the same time pretending to know where there is blood and where matter, which is a tendon and which a vein⁠—that peasant cannot conceive that Polikéy has lifted his hand to cut, without due knowledge. He himself could not have done it. And once the thing is done, he will not reproach himself with having given permission to cut unnecessarily. I don’t know about you, but I have experienced just the same with the doctor, who in obedience to my request was tormenting those dear to me. The lancet, the whitish bottle of sublimate, and the words, “the staggers⁠—glanders⁠—to let blood or matter,” etc., do they not come to the same thing as “nerves, rheumatism, organism,” etc.? Wage du zu irren und zu träume206 does not refer to poets so much as to doctors and veterinary surgeons.

III

On the evening when the village Meeting, in the cold darkness of an October night, was choosing the recruits and vociferating in front of the office, Polikéy sat on the edge of his bed, rubbing down some horse medicine upon the table with a bottle; but what it was, he himself did not know. He had there sublimate of mercury, sulphur, Glauber’s salts, and some kind of herb which he had gathered, having once imagined it to be good for broken wind, and now considered not useless in other disorders. The children had already gone to bed⁠—two on the oven, two on the bed, and one in the cradle beside which Akoulína sat spinning. The remainder of a candle⁠—one of the proprietress’s candles which had not been put away carefully enough⁠—was burning in a wooden candlestick on the windowsill, and Akoulína every now and then got up to snuff it with her fingers, so that her husband should not have to break off his important occupation. There existed independent thinkers who regarded Polikéy as a worthless farrier and a worthless man. Others, the majority, considered him a bad man, but a great master of his art; but Akoulína, though she often scolded and even beat her husband, thought him the first among farriers and the first among men. Polikéy sprinkled some kind of specific onto the palm of his hand (he never used a balance, and spoke ironically about the Germans who use balances: “This is not a pharmacy,” he used to say). Polikéy weighed the specific in his hand and tossed it up, but there did not seem enough of it, and he poured in ten times as much. “I’ll put in the lot,” he said to himself. “It will pick ’em up better.”

Akoulína quickly turned round at the sound of the autocrat’s voice, expecting some order; but, seeing that the business did not concern her, shrugged her shoulders.

“What knowledge!⁠ ⁠… Where does he get it?” she thought, and went on spinning. The paper which had held the specific fell to the floor. Akoulína did not let this pass unnoticed.

“Annie,” she cried, “look! Father has dropped something. Pick it up!”

Annie put out her thin little bare legs from under the cloak with which she was covered, slid down under the table like a kitten, and got the paper.

“Here, daddy,” she said, and with her little chilled feet darted back into bed.

“Don’t puth!” squeaked her lisping younger sister sleepily.

“I’ll give it you!” muttered Akoulína; and both heads disappeared again under the cloak.

“He’ll give me three roubles,” said Polikéy, corking up the bottle. “I’ll cure the horse. It’s even too cheap,” he added, “brain-splitting work!⁠ ⁠… Akoulína, go and ask Nikíta for a little ’baccy. I’ll return it tomorrow;” and Polikéy took out of his trouser-pocket a limewood pipe-stem which had once been painted, with a mouthpiece of sealing-wax, and began fixing it onto the bowl.

Akoulína left her spindle and went out, managing to steer clear of everything⁠—though this was not easy. Polikéy opened the cupboard and put away the medicine, then tilted a vodka bottle into his mouth, but it was empty, and he made a grimace; but when his wife brought the tobacco he sat down on the edge of the bed after filling and lighting his pipe, and his face shone with the content and pride of a man who has completed his day’s task. Whether he was thinking how on the morrow he would catch hold of a horse’s tongue and pour his wonderful mixture down its throat, or considering the fact that a useful person never gets a refusal⁠—“There, now! Hadn’t Nikíta sent him some tobacco?”⁠—anyhow, he felt happy.

Suddenly the door, hanging on one hinge, was thrown open, and a maidservant from up there⁠—not the second maid, but the third, the little one that was kept to run errands⁠—entered the cubicle. (Up there, as everyone