Sleepyhead

Night. Nursemaid Varka, aged thirteen, rocks the cradle where baby lies, and murmurs almost inaudibly:

“Bayú, bayúshki, bayú!
Nurse will sing a song to you!...”
In front of the ikon burns a green lamp; across the room from wall to wall stretches a cord on which hang baby-clothes and a great pair of black trousers. On the ceiling above the lamp shines a great green spot, and the baby-clothes and trousers cast long shadows on the stove, on the cradle, on Varka ... When the lamp flickers, the spot and shadows move as if from a draught. It is stifling. There is a smell of soup and boots.

The child cries. It has long been hoarse and weak from crying, but still it cries, and who can say when it will be comforted P And Varka wants to sleep. Her eyelids droop, her head hangs, her neck pains her ... She can hardly move her eyelids or her lips, and it seems to her that her face is sapless and petrified, and that her head has shrivelled up to the size of a pinhead.

“Bayú, bayúshki, bayú!” she murmurs, “Nurse is making pap for you...”

In the stove chirrups a cricket. In the next room behind that door snore Varka’s master and the journeyman Athanasius. The cradle creaks plaintively, Varka murmurs—and the two sounds mingle soothingly in a lullaby sweet to the ears of those who lie in bed. But now the music is only irritating and oppressive, for it inclines to sleep, and sleep is impossible. If Varka, which God forbid, were to go to sleep, her master and mistress would beat her.

The lamp flickers. The green spot and the shadows move about, they pass into the half-open, motionless eyes of Varka, and in her half-awakened brain blend in misty images. She sees dark clouds chasing one another across the sky and crying like the child. And then a wind blows; the clouds vanish; and Varka sees a wide road covered with liquid mud; along the road stretch waggons, men with satchels on their backs crawl along, and shadows move backwards and forwards; on either side through the chilly, thick mist are visible hills. And suddenly the men with the satchels, and the shadows collapse in the liquid mud. “Why is this?” asks Varka. “To sleep, to sleep!” comes the answer. And they sleep soundly, sleep sweetly; and on the telegraph wires perch crows, and cry like the child, and try to awaken them.

“Bayú, bayúshki, bayú. Nurse will sing a song to you,” murmurs Varka; and now she sees herself in a dark and stifling cabin.

On the floor lies her dead father, Yéfim Stépanoff. She cannot see him, but she hears him rolling from side to side, and groaning. In his own words he “has had a rupture.” The pain is so intense that he cannot utter a single word, and only inhales air and emits through his lips a drumming sound.

“Bu, bu, bu, bu, bu...”

Mother Pelageya has run to the manor-house to tell the squire that Yéfim is dying. She has been gone a long time ... will she ever return? Varka lies on the stove, and listens to her father’s “Bu, bu, bu, bu.’” And then someone drives up to the cabin door. It is the doctor, sent from the manor-house where he is staying as a guest. The doctor comes into the hut; in the darkness he is invisible, but Varka can hear him coughing and hear the creaking of the door.