XI
AFTER THE WARM, clear weather came mud time; it rained all through May, and it was cold. The noise of the mill wheels and the rain disposed one to laziness and sleepiness. The floor trembled, there was a smell of flour, and that also made one drowsy. My wife, in a short fur coat and high, man’s rubber boots, put in an appearance twice a day and always said one and the same thing:
‘‘And they call this summer! It’s worse than October!’’
Together we drank tea, cooked kasha, or sat silently for long hours waiting for the rain to stop. Once, when Stepan went off to a country fair somewhere, Masha spent the whole night at the mill. When we got up, it was impossible to tell what time it was, because the rain clouds covered the sky; only sleepy roosters crowed in Dubechnya, and corncrakes called in the meadow; it was still very, very early... My wife and I went down to the pool and pulled out the creel Stepan had set in our presence the day before. One big perch was struggling in it, and a bristling crayfish, his claw thrust up.
‘‘Let them out,’’ said Masha. ‘‘Let them be happy, too.’’
Because we got up very early and then did nothing, this day seemed very long, the longest in my life. Before evening Stepan came back, and I went home to the farmhouse.
‘‘Your father came today,’’ Masha told me.
‘‘Where is he?’’ I asked.
‘‘He left. I didn’t receive him.’’
Seeing that I stood there and said nothing, that I felt sorry for my father, she said:
‘‘One must be consistent. I didn’t receive him and sent word to him that he needn’t trouble himself anymore by coming to see us.’’
A minute later, I was out the gate and on my way to town to talk things over with my father. It was muddy, slippery, cold. For the first time since the wedding, I felt sad, and in my brain, weary from this long, gray day, the thought flashed that maybe I wasn’t living as I should. I was worn out, I gradually succumbed to faintheartedness, laziness, I didn’t want to move, to think, and, having gone a little way, I waved my hand and turned back.
In the middle of the yard stood the engineer in a leather coat with a hood, speaking loudly:
‘‘Where’s the furniture? There was fine furniture in the Empire style, there were paintings, there were vases, and now you could play skittles in it! I bought the estate with the furniture, devil take it!’’
Beside him, crumpling his hat in his hands, stood the widow Cheprakov’s hired man Moisei, a fellow of about twenty-five, skinny, slightly pockmarked, with insolent little eyes; one of his cheeks was slightly bigger than the other, as if he had slept on it.
‘‘You bought it without the furniture, if you please, Your Honor,’’ he said hesitantly. ‘‘I remember it, sir.’’
‘‘Silence!’’ the engineer shouted, turned purple, shook, and the echo in the garden loudly repeated his shout.
XII
WHENEVER I WAS doing something in the garden or the yard, Moisei stood nearby and, with his hands behind his back, watched me lazily and insolently with his little eyes. And this annoyed me so much that I would abandon my work and leave.
We learned from Stepan that this Moisei was the widow’s lover. I noticed that when people came to her for money, they first addressed themselves to Moisei, and once I saw a muzhik, all black, probably a coal shoveler, bow down at his feet; sometimes, after some whispering, he handed the money over himself, without telling the lady, from which I concluded that on occasion he operated independently, on his own account.
He went shooting in the garden under our windows, pilfered food from our cellar, took the horses without asking, and we became indignant, ceasing to believe that Dubechnya was ours, and Masha would say, turning pale:
‘‘Do we really have to live with these vermin for another year and a half?’
The widow’s son, Ivan Cheprakov, served as a conductor on our railway. Over the winter he had grown very thin and weak, so that one glass made him drunk, and he felt cold in the shade. He wore conductor’s dress with disgust and was ashamed of it, but he considered his post profitable because he could steal candles and sell them. My new position aroused in him mixed feelings of astonishment, envy, and the vague hope that something similar might happen to him. He followed Masha with admiring eyes, asked what I now ate for dinner, and a sad and sweet expression appeared on his emaciated, homely face, and he moved his fingers as if touching my happiness.
‘‘Listen, Small Profit,’’ he said fussily, relighting his cigarette every moment; the place where he stood was always littered, because he used dozens of matches to light one cigarette. ‘‘Listen, my life now is the meanest sort. The main thing is that every little officer can shout: ‘Hey, you, conductor!’ I’ve heard a lot on the train, brother, all sorts of things, and you know, I realized: what a rotten life! My mother ruined me! A doctor on the train told me: if the parents are depraved, the children come out drunkards or criminals. That’s how it is!’’
Once he came into the yard reeling. His eyes wandered senselessly, he was breathing heavily; he laughed, cried, said something as if in feverish delirium, and all I could make out in his confused talk were the words: ‘‘My mother! Where’s my mother?’’ which he pronounced tearfully, like a child that has lost its mother in a crowd. I took him to our orchard and lay him down under a tree, and then all day and all night Masha and I took turns sitting by him. He was in poor shape, and Masha looked at his pale wet face with loathing, saying:
‘‘Will these vermin really be living in our yard for another year and a half? It’s terrible! Terrible!’’
And how much grief the peasants caused us! How many painful disappointments at the very first, in the spring months, when we so wanted to be happy! My wife was building a school. I drew the plan of a school for sixty boys, and the zemstvo17 council approved of it but advised building the school in Kurilovka, a big village that was only two miles from us; incidentally, the Kurilovka school, in which the children of four villages studied, including those from our Dubechnya, was old and small, and one had to walk warily on its rotted floor. At the end of March, Masha, at her own wish, was appointed trustee of the Kurilovka school, and at the beginning of April, we called meetings three times and tried to persuade the peasants that their school was small and old and that it was necessary to build a new one. A member of the zemstvo council came, and an inspector from the state school system, and also tried to persuade them. After each meeting, they surrounded us and asked for a bucket of vodka; it was hot in the crowd, we soon grew weary and returned home displeased and somewhat abashed. In the end, the peasants allotted a piece of land for the school and took it upon themselves to deliver all the building materials from town with their horses. And as soon as they were finished with the spring crops, on the very first Sunday, carts went from Kurilovka and Dubechnya to bring bricks for the foundation. They left at first light and came back late in the evening; the muzhiks were drunk and said they were exhausted.
As if on purpose, the rain and cold continued all through May. The road was ruined, turned to mud. The carts usually stopped by our yard on their way from town—and what a horror that was! Now a horse appears in the gateway, big-bellied, its forelegs splayed; it curtsies before coming into the yard; a thirty-foot beam comes crawling in on a dray, wet, slimy-looking; beside it, wrapped up against the rain, not looking under his feet, not avoiding the puddles, strides a muzhik, his coat skirts tucked up under his belt. Another cart appears with planks, then a third with a beam, a fourth... and the space in front of the house gradually becomes crammed with horses, beams, boards. Muzhiks and women with wrapped heads and tucked-up skirts look angrily at our windows, noisily demand that the lady come out to them; coarse abuse can be heard. And Moisei stands to one side, and it seems to us that he delights in our disgrace.
‘‘We won’t do any more carting!’’ shout the muzhiks. ‘‘We’re exhausted! Go and do your own carting!’’
Masha, pale, distraught, thinking they wer
e about to break into our house, gives them money for a half-bucket of vodka, after which the noise subsides, and the long beams crawl out of the yard one after another.
When I got ready to go to the construction site, my wife became worried and said:
‘‘The peasants are angry. They might do something to you. No, wait, I’ll go with you.’’
We drove off to Kurilovka together, and there the carpenters asked us for a tip. The frame was ready, it was time to lay the foundation, but the masons did not come; there was a delay, and the carpenters murmured. But when the masons finally came, it turned out that there was no sand: the need for it had somehow been overlooked. Taking advantage of our helpless position, the peasants asked thirty kopecks per cartload, though it was less than a quarter of a mile from the construction site to the river, where they took the sand, and all told, we needed five hundred cartloads. There was no end of misunderstanding, abuse, and extortion, my wife was indignant, and Titus Petrov, the masonry contractor, a seventy-year-old man, took her by the hand and said:
‘‘Look here! Look here! Just get me the sand, and I’ll round you up ten men at once, and in two days it’ll be ready. Look here!’’
But the sand was delivered, two days, four days, a week went by, and a pit still yawned in the place of the future foundation.
‘‘It could drive you crazy!’’ My wife was agitated. ‘‘What people! What people!’’
During these disorders, the engineer Viktor Ivanych used to visit us. He would bring bags of wine and delicacies, spend a long time eating, and then fall asleep on the terrace and snore so loudly that the workers shook their heads and said:
‘‘Well, now!’’
Masha was usually not glad of his coming, did not trust him, and at the same time asked for his advice; when, having slept after dinner, he woke up out of sorts and said bad things about our farming, or expressed regret that he had bought Dubechnya, which had already caused him so many losses, a look of anguish would come to poor Masha’s face; she complained to him, and he yawned and said that peasants should be whipped.
He called our marriage and our life a comedy, said it was a whim and an indulgence.
‘‘Something like this already happened with her,’’ he told me about Masha. ‘‘She once fancied herself an opera singer and left me; I searched for her for two months and spent, my gentle one, a thousand roubles on telegrams alone.’’
He no longer called me a sectarian or Mr. Housepainter, or approved of my working life as before, but said:
‘‘You’re a strange man! You’re an abnormal man! I wouldn’t venture to prophesy, but you’ll end badly, sir!’’
And Masha slept poorly at night and kept thinking about something, sitting by the window in our bedroom. There was no more laughter over dinner, no making sweet grimaces. I suffered, and when it rained, every drop of rain pierced my heart like birdshot, and I was ready to kneel before Masha and apologize for the weather. When the muzhiks made noise in the yard, I also felt myself guilty. I spent whole hours sitting in one spot, thinking only of what a wonderful, what a magnificent person Masha was. I loved her passionately and admired everything she did, everything she said. She had a penchant for quiet, studious occupations; she liked to spend a long time reading, studying something; she, who knew farming only from books, astonished us all with her knowledge, and the advice she used to give was all useful, and none of it went for naught. And with all that, so much nobility, taste, and good humor, that good humor which occurs only in exceptionally well-brought-up people!
For this woman, with her healthy, positive mind, the disorderly situation we now lived in, with its petty cares and squabbles, was tormenting; I saw it and could not sleep nights myself, my head worked, tears choked me. I thrashed about, not knowing what to do.
I galloped to town and brought Masha books, newspapers, sweets, flowers; I went fishing with Stepan and waded for hours up to my neck in cold water, under the rain, to catch a burbot in order to diversify our meals; I stooped to asking the muzhiks not to make noise, gave them vodka, bribed them, made them various promises. And did so many other foolish things!
The rain finally stopped, the earth dried. You get up early, at four o’clock—dew glistening on the flowers, birds and insects noising about, not a single cloud in the sky; the orchard, the meadow, and the river so beautiful, but then memories of the muzhiks, the carts, the engineer! Masha and I drove out to the fields in a racing droshky to look at the oats. She was the driver, I sat behind; her shoulders were raised, and the wind played with her hair.
‘‘Keep right!’’ she shouted to oncoming drivers.
‘‘You’re just like a coachman!’’ I said to her once.
‘‘Maybe so! My grandfather, the engineer’s father, was a coachman. Didn’t you know that?’’ she asked, turning to me, and at once imitated the way coachmen shout and sing.
‘‘Thank God!’’ I thought, listening to her. ‘‘Thank God!’’
And again memories of the muzhiks, the carts, the engineer...
XIII
DR. BLAGOVO CAME out on a bicycle. My sister began to visit often. Again there were conversations about physical labor, about progress, about the mysterious X that awaits mankind in the distant future. The doctor didn’t like our farming because it interfered with our arguing, and said that to plow, mow, and tend calves was unworthy of a free man, and that in time people would charge animals and machines with these crude forms of the struggle for existence, and would themselves be occupied solely with scientific studies. And my sister kept asking to be allowed to go home earlier, and if she stayed till late evening or overnight, there was no end to her worrying.
‘‘My God, what a child you still are!’’ Masha would say in reproach. ‘‘It’s even ridiculous, finally.’’
‘‘Yes, ridiculous,’’ my sister would agree, ‘‘I’m aware that it’s ridiculous; but what am I to do if I’m unable to overcome myself? It always seems to me that I act badly.’’
During the haymaking, my whole body ached from lack of habit; sitting on the terrace with everybody in the evening and talking, I would suddenly fall asleep, and they laughed loudly at me. They would wake me up and sit me at the table for supper, drowsiness would come over me, and, as in oblivion, I would see lights, faces, plates, hear voices without understanding them. And getting up early in the morning, I would at once take the scythe or go off to the construction site and work all day.
Staying home on holidays, I noticed that my wife and sister were concealing something from me and even seemed to be avoiding me. My wife was tender with me as before, but she had some thoughts of her own that she did not impart to me. There was no doubt that her irritation with the peasants was growing, life was becoming ever more difficult for her, and yet she no longer complained to me. She now talked with the doctor more willingly than with me, and I didn’t understand why that was so.
There was a custom in our province: at haymaking and harvest time, workers came in the evenings to the master’s yard to be treated to vodka, even young girls drank a glass. We did not observe it; the mowers and women stood in our yard till late in the evening, waiting for vodka, and then went away cursing. Masha frowned sternly during this time and was silent, or said irritably to the doctor in a low voice:
‘‘Savages! Pechenegs!’’18
In the country, newcomers are given an unfriendly, almost hostile welcome, as at school. We, too, were welcomed in that way. At first we were looked upon as stupid and simple people who had bought an estate only because there was nothing else to do with the money. We were laughed at. The muzhiks let their cattle graze in our woods and even in the orchard, they drove our cows and horses to their village and then came to demand money for damages. They came into our yard in whole companies and noisily complained that, while mowing, we had supposedly encroached on the border of some Bysheevka or Semyonikha that did not belong to us; and since we did not yet know the precise boundaries of our land, we took their word for it and
paid the fine; later, it would turn out that we had mowed correctly. They stripped bast 19 in our woods. One Dubechnya muzhik, a kulak20 who dealt in vodka without a license, bribed our workers and, together with them, deceived us in a most treacherous way: replaced the new wheels on our carts with old ones, took our horse collars and then sold them back to us, and so on. But most offensive of all was what was happening at the Kurilovka construction site; at night the women stole planks, bricks, tiles, sheet iron; the elder searched their houses in the presence of witnesses, the assembly fined each of them two roubles, and then they all drank up the money together.
When Masha learned of it, she would say indignantly to the doctor or my sister:
‘‘What animals! It’s awful! Awful!’’
And more than once I heard her express regret at undertaking the building of the school.
‘‘Understand,’’ the doctor persuaded her, ‘‘understand that if you build this school and generally do good, it’s not for the muzhiks but in the name of culture, in the name of the future. And the worse these muzhiks are, the more reason to build the school. Understand that!’’
In his voice, however, one could hear a lack of assurance, and it seemed to me that he and Masha both hated the muzhiks.
Masha often went to the mill and took my sister with her, and the two of them laughingly said they were going to look at Stepan, how handsome he was. Stepan, it turned out, was slow and taciturn only with men, but in the company of women behaved quite casually and talked incessantly. Once, going to the river to swim, I involuntarily overheard a conversation. Masha and Cleopatra, both in white dresses, were sitting on the bank under a willow, in a broad patch of shade, and Stepan was standing nearby, his hands behind his back, saying:
‘‘Are peasants people? They aren’t people but, excuse me, beastly folk, charlatans. What kind of life does a peasant have? Only eating, drinking, getting cheaper grub, straining his gullet witlessly in the pot-house; and no nice conversation for you, no manners, no form—just boorishness! Sits in dirt himself, and his wife sits in dirt, and his children sit in dirt, he sleeps in whatever he’s got on him, he picks potatoes from the cabbage soup straight out with his fingers, he drinks his kvass with cockroaches—might at least blow it aside!’’
The Complete Short Novels Page 52