Lent came. The engineer Viktor Ivanych, whose existence I was beginning to forget, arrived from Petersburg. He arrived unexpectedly, without even a warning telegram. When I came in the evening as usual, he, scrubbed, hair trimmed, looking ten years younger, was pacing the drawing room and telling about something; his daughter was on her knees, taking boxes, flacons, and books from the suitcases and handing it all to the footman Pavel. Seeing the engineer, I involuntarily stepped back, but he held out both arms to me and said, smiling, showing his white, strong coachman’s teeth:
‘‘Here he is, here he is! Very glad to see you, Mr. Housepainter! Masha has told me everything, she’s sung a whole panegyric to you here. I fully understand and approve of you!’’ he went on, taking me under the arm. ‘‘To be a decent worker is much more intelligent and honest than to waste official stationery and wear a cockade on your forehead. I myself worked in Belgium, with these hands, then spent two years as an engine driver...’
He was wearing a short jacket and slippers for around the house, and walked like a man with gout, waddling slightly and rubbing his hands. Humming something, he murmured softly and kept hugging himself with satisfaction that he had finally come back home and taken his beloved shower.
‘‘Indisputably,’’ he said to me over supper, ‘‘indisputably, you’re all nice, sympathetic people, but for some reason, gentlemen, as soon as you undertake some physical labor or start saving muzhiks, it all comes down in the end to sectarianism. Aren’t you a sectarian? Look, you don’t drink vodka. What’s that if not sectarianism?’’
To give him pleasure, I drank some vodka. I also drank some wine. We sampled cheeses, sausages, pâtés, pickles, and various delicacies the engineer had brought along, and the wines received from abroad during his absence. The wines were excellent. For some reason, the engineer received wines and cigars from abroad tax-free; someone sent him caviar and smoked fish gratis, he paid no rent for his apartment because the owner of the house supplied the railway line with kerosene; and in general, he and his daughter gave me the impression that everything best in the world was at their disposal, and they received it completely gratis.
I continued to frequent them, but no longer as willingly. The engineer hampered me, and I felt constrained in his presence. I couldn’t stand his clear, innocent eyes, his reasonings oppressed me, disgusted me; oppressive, too, was the memory of my being so recently a subordinate of this well-nourished, ruddy man, and of his being mercilessly rude to me. True, he put his arm around my waist, patted me benignly on the shoulder, approved of my life, but I felt that he scorned my nonentity as much as before and put up with me only to please his daughter; I could no longer laugh and say what I liked, I behaved unsociably and kept waiting every moment for him to call me Pantelei, as he did his footman Pavel. How exasperated my provincial, philistine pride was! I, a proletarian, a housepainter, go every day to see rich people, strangers to me, whom the whole town looks upon as foreigners, and every day drink expensive wines with them and eat exotic things—my conscience refused to be reconciled with it! On the way to them, I sullenly avoided passersby and looked from under my brows, as if I was indeed a sectarian, and when I went home from the engineer’s, I was ashamed of my satiety.
And above all, I was afraid of becoming infatuated. Whether I was walking down the street, or working, or talking with the boys, all I thought about the whole time was how in the evening I would go to Marya Viktorovna’s, and I imagined her voice, her laughter, her gait. Before going to her each time, I stood for a long while in front of my nanny’s crooked mirror, tying my necktie; I found my tricot suit repulsive, and I suffered and at the same time despised myself for being so petty. When she called to me from the other room to say she was undressed and asked me to wait, I listened to her getting dressed; this excited me, I felt as if the floor was giving way under me. And when I saw a female figure in the street, even from afar, I invariably made the comparison; it seemed to me then that all our women and girls were vulgarly, absurdly dressed and did not know how to behave; and these comparisons aroused a feeling of pride in me: Marya Viktorovna was the best of all! And at night I saw the two of us in my dreams.
Once, at supper, the engineer and I ate a whole lobster together. Going home then, I remembered that at supper the engineer had twice addressed me as ‘‘my most gentle,’’ and I reasoned that I was being petted in this house like a big, unhappy dog that has lost its master, that I was an amusement, and when they tired of me, they would chase me away like a dog. I felt ashamed and pained, pained to the point of tears, as if I had been insulted, and, looking at the heavens, I vowed to put an end to all this.
The next day I did not go to the Dolzhikovs’. Late in the evening, when it was quite dark and pouring rain, I walked down Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya, looking at the windows. The Azhogins were already asleep, and only in one of the end windows was there a light; it was the old Azhogin woman in her bedroom, doing embroidery to the light of three candles, imagining she was fighting prejudice. Our house was dark, and in the house across the street, at the Dolzhikovs’, there was light in the windows, but nothing could be seen through the flowers and curtains. I kept walking up and down the street; the cold March rain poured down on me. I heard my father come back from the club; he knocked at the gate, a minute later there was light in the window, and I saw my sister walking hurriedly with a lamp, straightening her thick hair with one hand as she went. Then father paced up and down the drawing room and talked about something, rubbing his hands, and my sister sat motionless in an armchair, thinking about something, not listening to him.
But then they left, the light went out... I turned to look at the engineer’s house—there, too, it was dark now. In the darkness, under the rain, I felt myself hopelessly lonely, abandoned to my fate, felt that, compared with this solitude of mine, compared with my suffering, the present and that which still lay ahead of me in life, all my deeds, desires, and all that I had thought and said till now, were terribly petty. Alas, the deeds and thoughts of living beings are far less significant than their sorrows! And without giving myself a clear account of what I was doing, I pulled with all my might on the doorbell at the Dolzhikovs’ gate, tore it off, and ran down the street like a little boy, feeling afraid and thinking that now they were sure to come out and recognize me. When I stopped at the end of the street to catch my breath, the only thing to be heard was the sound of the rain and a night watchman rapping on an iron bar somewhere far away.
For a whole week, I didn’t go to the Dolzhikovs’. The tricot suit got sold. There was no painting work, and again I starved, earning ten or twenty kopecks a day, wherever I could, by heavy, unpleasant work. Floundering knee-deep in cold mud, straining my chest, I wanted to stifle my memories, as if taking revenge on myself for all those cheeses and potted meats I had been treated to at the engineer’s; but all the same, as soon as I went to bed, hungry and wet, my sinful imagination began at once to paint wonderful, seductive pictures, and I confessed to myself in amazement that I was in love, passionately in love, and I would fall asleep soundly and healthily, feeling that this life of hard labor only made my body stronger and younger.
On one of those evenings, it snowed unseasonably, and the wind blew from the north as if winter was coming again. On returning from work that evening, I found Marya Viktorovna in my room. She was sitting in her fur coat, holding both hands in her muff.
‘‘Why don’t you come to see me?’’ she asked, raising her intelligent, clear eyes, while I was greatly embarrassed from joy and stood at attention before her, as before my father when he was about to beat me; she looked into my face, and I could see from her eyes that she understood why I was embarrassed.
‘‘Why don’t you come to see me?’’ she repeated. ‘‘If you don’t want to come, here, I’ve come myself.’’
She stood up and came close to me.
‘‘Don’t abandon me,’’ she said, and her eyes filled with tears. ‘‘I’m alone, completely alone!’’
> She began to cry and said, covering her face with her muff:
‘‘Alone! It’s hard for me to live, very hard, and I have no one in the whole world except you. Don’t abandon me!’’
Looking for a handkerchief to wipe her tears, she smiled; we were silent for a while, then I embraced and kissed her, getting a bloody scratch on my cheek as I did so from the pin that held her hat.
And we began talking as if we had been close to each other for a long, long time...
X
SOME TWO DAYS later, she sent me to Dubechnya, and I was unspeakably glad of it. On my way to the station, and then sitting on the train, I laughed for no reason, and people looked at me as if I was drunk. It was snowing, and there were morning frosts, but the roads had already darkened, and rooks, crowing, flitted over them.
At first I planned to set up quarters for the two of us, Masha and me, in the side wing opposite Mrs. Cheprakov’s wing, but it turned out that it had long been inhabited by pigeons and ducks, and it would be impossible to clean it out without destroying a multitude of nests. I had, willy-nilly, to go to the inhospitable rooms of the big house with jalousies. The muzhiks called this house a mansion; it had more than twenty rooms and no furniture except the piano and a child’s chair that lay in the attic, and if Masha had brought all her furniture from town, even then we would not have managed to get rid of this impression of gloomy emptiness and coldness. I chose three smaller rooms with windows on the garden, and cleaned them from early morning till night, putting in new window glass, hanging wallpaper, filling the cracks and holes in the floor. It was easy, pleasant work. Time and again I ran to the river to see if the ice was breaking up; I kept imagining that the starlings had flown back. And at night, thinking about Masha, I listened, with an inexpressibly sweet feeling, with a thrilling joy, to the sound of the rats and the wind howling and knocking above the ceiling; it seemed as though some old household spirit was coughing in the attic.
The snow was deep; at the end of March, a lot more poured down, but it melted quickly, as if by magic, the spring waters flowed stormily, and by the beginning of April the starlings were already making their racket, and yellow butterflies flew about the garden. The weather was wonderful. Every day towards evening, I headed for town to meet Masha, and what a pleasure it was to go barefoot on the drying, still-soft road! Halfway there, I would sit down and look at the town, not venturing to go nearer. The sight of it perplexed me. I kept thinking: how would my acquaintances treat me when they learned of my love? What would my father say? Especially perplexing was the thought that my life had become more complicated, and I had totally lost the ability to control it, and, like a big balloon, it was carrying me God knows where. I no longer thought of how to provide nourishment for myself, how to live, but thought—I truly can’t remember of what.
Masha would come in a carriage; I would get in with her, and we would go to Dubechnya together, merry, free. Or, after waiting till sunset, I would return home displeased, downcast, puzzling over why Masha hadn’t come, and by the gates of the estate or in the garden, a sweet phantom— she!—would meet me unexpectedly! It turned out that she had come by train and walked from the station. How festive it was! In a simple woolen dress, in a kerchief, with a modest parasol, but tightly laced, trim, in expensive imported shoes—this was a talented actress playing the little tradeswoman. We looked over our domain, deciding which room was whose, where we would have alleys, the kitchen garden, the apiary. We already had chickens, ducks, and geese, which we loved because they were ours. We already had oats, clover, timothy, buckwheat, and vegetable seeds ready for sowing, and we examined it all each time and had long discussions of what the harvest might be, and everything Masha said seemed to me remarkably intelligent and beautiful. This was the happiest time of my life.
Soon after Saint Thomas’s Sunday,16 we were married in our parish church, in the village of Kurilovka, two miles from Dubechnya. Masha wanted everything to be done modestly; at her wish, we had peasant lads as best men, the beadle did all the singing, and we came home from church in a small, jolty tarantass, and she herself did the driving. Our only guest from town was my sister Cleopatra, to whom Masha sent a note three days before the wedding. My sister wore a white dress and gloves. During the ceremony, she cried quietly from tenderness and joy, the expression of her face was motherly, infinitely kind. She was drunk with our happiness and smiled as though she was inhaling sweet fumes, and, looking at her during our wedding, I understood that for her there was nothing higher in the world than love, earthly love, and that she dreamed of it secretly, timorously, but constantly and passionately. She embraced and kissed Masha and, not knowing how to express her rapture, kept saying to her about me: ‘‘He’s kind! He’s very kind!’’
Before leaving us, she changed into her ordinary dress and led me to the garden to talk with me one to one.
‘‘Father is very upset that you didn’t write anything to him,’’ she said. ‘‘You should have asked his blessing. But essentially he’s very pleased. He says that this marriage will raise you in the eyes of all society, and that under the influence of Marya Viktorovna, you’ll take a more serious attitude towards life. In the evenings we talk only about you, and yesterday he even used the phrase ‘our Misail.’ That made me glad. Evidently he has something in mind, and it seems he wants to show you an example of magnanimity and be the first to start talking about a reconciliation. It’s very possible that he’ll come to see you one of these days.’’
She hastily crossed me several times and said:
‘‘Well, God be with you, I wish you happiness. Anyuta Blagovo is a very intelligent girl, she says of your marriage that God is sending you a new test. What, then? In family life there are not only joys but also sufferings. It’s impossible without that.’’
Seeing her off, Masha and I went on foot about two miles; then, on the way back, we walked slowly and silently, as if resting. Masha held my hand, our hearts were light, and we no longer wanted to speak of love; after our marriage, we became still closer and dearer to each other, and it seemed to us that nothing could separate us now.
‘‘Your sister is a sympathetic being,’’ said Masha, ‘‘but it looks as though she’s been tormented for a long time. Your father must be a terrible man.’’
I began to tell her how my sister and I had been brought up and indeed how tormenting and senseless our childhood had been. Learning that my father had beaten me still so recently, she shuddered and pressed herself to me.
‘‘Don’t tell me any more,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s frightening.’’
Now she never parted from me. We lived in the big house, in three rooms, and in the evening tightly bolted the door leading to the empty part of the house, as if someone lived there whom we did not know and were afraid of. I got up early, at dawn, and straightaway started some work. I repaired the carts, laid out the paths in the garden, dug the flower beds, painted the roof of the house. When the time came for sowing oats, I tried my hand at cross-plowing, harrowing, sowing, and I did it all conscientiously, without lagging behind the hired man; I’d get tired from the rain, and the sharp, cold wind made my face and legs burn for a long time, and at night I dreamed of plowed earth. But working in the fields did not attract me. I didn’t know farming and didn’t like it; the reason for that might have been that my ancestors were not tillers of the soil, and pure city blood flowed in my veins. Nature I loved tenderly, I loved the fields and meadows, and the kitchen garden, but the muzhik turning over the soil with a wooden plow, bedraggled, wet, his neck stretched out, urging on his pitiful horse, was for me the expression of a crude, wild, ugly force, and each time I looked at his clumsy movements, I involuntarily began to think of that long-gone, legendary life before people knew the use of fire. The stern bull going about with the peasant’s herd, and the horses, when they raced through the village, their hooves pounding, inspired fear in me, and everything at all big, strong, and angry, whether it was a ram with horns, a gander, or a watc
hdog, was to me an expression of the same crude, wild force. This prejudice spoke in me especially strongly during bad weather, when heavy clouds hung over the black plowed fields. But above all, when I plowed or sowed, and two or three people stood and watched me do it, I had no consciousness that this labor was inevitable and obligatory, and it seemed to me that I was amusing myself. And I preferred to do something in the yard and liked nothing so much as painting the roof.
I used to go through the garden and through the meadow to our mill. It was leased to Stepan, a muzhik from Kurilovka, handsome, swarthy, with a thick black beard, a very strong man by the look of him. He didn’t like the work at the mill, and considered it boring and unprofitable, and he lived at the mill only so as not to live at home. He was a harness-maker, and there was always a pleasant smell of tar and leather about him. He didn’t like talking, was sluggish, inert, and kept crooning ‘‘Oo-loo-loo-loo’’ to himself as he sat on the riverbank or in the doorway. Occasionally his wife and mother-in-law would come to him from Kurilovka, both of them fair-skinned, languid, meek; they bowed low to him and addressed him formally as ‘‘Stepan Petrovich.’’ But he, not responding to their bows either by a gesture or by a word, sat apart on the riverbank and crooned softly ‘‘Ooloo-loo-loo.’’ An hour or two would pass in silence. Mother-in-law and wife would exchange whispers, get up, look at him for some time, waiting for him to turn and look at them, then bow low and say in sweet, singsong voices:
‘‘Good-bye, Stepan Petrovich!’’
And go away. After that, picking up a bundle of bread rolls or a shirt, Stepan would sigh and say, winking in their direction:
‘‘The female sex!’’
The mill, with its two sets of millstones, worked day and night. I helped Stepan, it was to my liking, and when he went off somewhere, I willingly stayed in his place.
The Complete Short Novels Page 51