‘‘But that’s poverty!’’ my sister put in.
‘‘What poverty! Want, true, but then there’s want and want, madam. If a man sits in jail or, say, is blind or crippled, that God should better spare us all, but if he’s free, can use his intelligence, has eyes and hands, has strength, has God, then what more does he need? It’s indulgence, madam, ignorance, and not poverty. If you, let’s suppose, as good masters, being educated, want to offer him charitable assistance, he’s so vile that he’ll drink up your money, or worse still, open a drinking establishment himself and use your money to rob people. Poverty, you’re pleased to say. But does the wealthy peasant live better? Excuse me, but he also lives like a pig. A boor, a loudmouth, a blockhead, wider than he is tall, a fat red mug—the scoundrel’s just begging you to haul off and whack him. This Larion from Dubechnya is also rich, but don’t worry, he strips bast in your forest no worse than a poor man; he’s foulmouthed, and his children are foulmouthed, and when he’s had a drop too much, he plunks his nose down in a puddle and sleeps. They’re all worthless, madam. Living in the village with them is like living in hell. It sticks in my craw, this village, and I thank the Lord, the Heavenly King, that I’m fed and clothed, and have served my term as a dragoon, and spent three years as elder, and am now a free Cossack: I live where I like. I have no wish to live in the village, and nobody has the right to make me. Your wife, they say. You, they say, are obliged to live in the cottage with your wife. Why is that? I’m not hired out to her.’’
‘‘Tell me, Stepan, did you marry for love?’’ asked Masha.
‘‘What kind of love do we have in the village?’’ Stepan asked and grinned. ‘‘As a matter of fact, madam, if you wish to know, I’m married for the second time. I’m not from Kurilovka myself, I’m from Zalegoshche, but I was taken to Kurilovka later as a son-in-law. Meaning my parent had no wish to divide his land among us—we’re five brothers— so I bowed out and took off, went to another village as a son-in-law. But my first wife died young.’’
‘‘What from?’’
‘‘Foolishness. Used to cry, she did, kept crying and crying for no reason, and just withered away. Kept drinking some kind of herbs to get prettier and must have damaged her insides. And my second wife, from Kurilovka—what about her? A village wench, a peasant, nothing more! When they matched me with her, I took a fancy: I thought, she’s young, fair-skinned, they live clean. Her mother was something like a flagellant21 and drank coffee, but the main thing was, they lived clean! So I married the girl, and the next day we sat down to dinner, I told my mother-in-law to give me a spoon, she gave me a spoon, and I see she wipes it with her finger. There you have it, I thought, that’s clean for you! I lived with them a year and left. Maybe I should have married a city girl,’’ he went on after a pause. ‘‘They say a wife is her husband’s helpmeet. I don’t need a helpmeet, I’m my own helpmeet, but you’d better talk to me, and not all that blah, blah, blah, but thoroughly, feelingly. Without good talk— what kind of life is it!’’
Stepan suddenly fell silent, and at once came his dull, monotonous ‘‘Oo-loo-loo-loo.’’ That meant he had seen me.
Masha often went to the mill and evidently found pleasure in conversing with Stepan; Stepan abused the muzhiks so sincerely and with such conviction—and she was attracted to him. Each time she came back from the mill, the peasant simpleton who watched over the orchard shouted at her:
‘‘Wench Palashka! Hi there, wench Palashka!’’ and barked at her like a dog: ‘‘Bow-wow!’’
And she would stop and look at him attentively, as if in that simpleton’s barking she found an answer to her thoughts, and he probably attracted her as did Stepan’s abuse. And at home some news would be waiting for her, such as, for example, that the village geese had trampled our cabbage patch, or that Larion had stolen the reins, and, shrugging her shoulders, she would say with a smile:
‘‘What do you want from these people!’’
She was indignant, she was all seething in her soul, and meanwhile I was getting used to the muzhiks and felt more drawn to them. They were mostly nervous, irritated, insulted people; they were people of suppressed imagination, ignorant, with a poor, dull outlook, with ever the same thoughts about the gray earth, gray days, black bread, people who were sly but, like birds, only hid their heads behind a tree— who didn’t know how to count. They wouldn’t go to your haymaking for twenty roubles, but they would go for a half-bucket of vodka, though for twenty roubles they could buy four buckets. In fact, there was filth, and drunkenness, and stupidity, and deceit, but with all that you could feel, nevertheless, that the muzhiks’ life was generally upheld by some strong, healthy core. However much the muzhik looks like a clumsy beast as he follows his plow, and however much he befuddles himself with vodka, still, on looking closer, you feel that there is in him something necessary and very important that is lacking, for instance, in Masha and the doctor—namely, he believes that the chief thing on earth is truth, and that his salvation and that of all people lies in truth alone, and therefore he loves justice more than anything else in the world. I would tell my wife that she saw the spots on the windowpane, but not the windowpane itself; she would say nothing in reply, or start crooning ‘‘Oo-loo-loo-loo’’ like Stepan... When this kind, intelligent woman grew pale with indignation and, in a trembling voice, talked with the doctor about drunkenness and deceit, I was puzzled and struck by her forgetfulness. How could she forget that her father, the engineer, also drank, drank a lot, and that the money that had gone to purchase Dubechnya had been acquired by a whole series of brazen, shameless deceptions? How could she forget?
XIV
AND MY SISTER also lived her own life, which she carefully concealed from me. She often whispered with Masha. When I approached her, she shrank back, and her look became guilty, entreating; obviously something was happening in her soul that she was afraid or ashamed of. So as not to meet me somehow in the garden or be left alone with me, she stayed close to Masha all the time, and I rarely had a chance to talk with her, only over dinner.
One evening I was walking slowly through the garden, coming back from the construction site. It was beginning to get dark. Not noticing me, not hearing my footsteps, my sister was walking near an old, spreading apple tree, quite noiselessly, like a phantom. She was dressed in black and walked quickly, along the same line, back and forth, looking at the ground. An apple fell from the tree; she gave a start at the noise, stopped, and pressed her hands to her temples. Just then I came up to her.
In an impulse of tender love that suddenly flooded my heart, in tears, for some reason remembering our mother, our childhood, I put my arms around her shoulders and kissed her.
‘‘What’s the matter with you?’’ I asked. ‘‘You’re suffering, I’ve seen it for a long time. Tell me, what’s the matter?’’
‘‘I’m frightened...’ she said, trembling.
‘‘But what’s the matter?’’ I insisted. ‘‘For God’s sake, be open with me!’’
‘‘I will, I will be open with you, I’ll tell you the whole truth. Concealing it from you is so hard, so painful! Misail, I’m in love...’ she went on in a whisper. ‘‘I’m in love, I’m in love... I’m happy, but why am I so frightened?’’
There was the sound of footsteps, Dr. Blagovo appeared among the trees in his silk shirt and high boots. Evidently they had arranged a meeting here by the apple tree. Seeing him, she rushed to him impulsively, with a pained cry, as if he was being taken from her:
‘‘Vladimir! Vladimir!’’
She pressed herself to him and looked greedily into his face, and only now did I notice how thin and pale she had become recently. It was especially noticeable by her lace collar, which I had long known and which now lay more loosely than ever around her long and slender neck. The doctor became embarrassed but recovered at once and said, smoothing her hair:
‘‘Well, come, come...Why so nervous? You see, I’m here.’’
We were silent, glancing
shyly at each other. Then the three of us walked on, and I heard the doctor say to me:
‘‘Cultured life has not yet begun with us. The old men comfort themselves that if there’s nothing now, there was something in the forties or the sixties;22 that’s the old men, but you and I are young, our brains have not yet been touched by marasmus senilis, and we cannot comfort ourselves with such illusions. Russia began in the year 862, 23 but cultured Russia, in my understanding, has never yet begun.’’
But I didn’t enter into these reflections. Strange as it was, I didn’t want to believe that my sister was in love, that she was now walking and holding this stranger’s hand, looking tenderly at him. My sister, this nervous, intimidated, downtrodden, unfree being, loves a man who is already married and has children! I felt sorry about something, precisely what I didn’t know; the doctor’s presence was now unpleasant for some reason, and I simply couldn’t understand what could come of this love of theirs.
XV
MASHA AND I were driving to Kurilovka for the blessing of the school. 24
‘‘Autumn, autumn, autumn...’ Masha was saying softly, looking around. ‘‘Summer’s over. There are no birds, and only the pussywillows are still green.’’
Yes, summer was over. The days are clear, warm, but the mornings are chilly, the shepherds now go out in sheepskin coats, and in our garden the dew on the asters doesn’t dry the whole day. You hear plaintive noises, and there’s no telling whether it’s a shutter whining on its rusty hinges or the cranes flying—and you feel so good and want so much to live!
‘‘Summer’s over...’ Masha was saying. ‘‘Now you and I can sum things up. We’ve worked a lot, thought a lot, we’re the better for it—honor and glory to us—we’ve succeeded at personal improvement; but did these successes of ours have any noticeable influence on the life around us, were they of any use to anyone? No. The ignorance, the physical filth, the drunkenness, the shockingly high infant mortality—it all remains as it was, and the fact that you plowed and sowed, and I spent money and read books, hasn’t made things better for anyone. Obviously we worked only for ourselves and had broad minds only for ourselves.’’
Such reasoning disconcerted me, and I didn’t know what to think.
‘‘We were sincere from beginning to end,’’ I said, ‘‘and whoever is sincere is right.’’
‘‘Who disputes that? We were right, but we did not rightly accomplish what we were right about. First of all, our external methods themselves—aren’t they mistaken? You want to be useful to people, but the very fact of your buying an estate precludes from the start all possibility of doing anything useful for them. Then, if you work, dress, and eat like a muzhik, by your own authority you legitimize, as it were, these heavy, clumsy clothes of theirs, their terrible cottages, their stupid beards... On the other hand, suppose you work a long time, very long, all your life, and in the end you get some practical results, but what are they, these results of yours, what can they do against such elemental forces as wholesale ignorance, hunger, cold, degeneracy? A drop in the ocean! Other methods of fighting are needed here, strong, bold, quick! If you really want to be useful, leave the narrow circle of ordinary activity and try to act upon the masses as a whole! What’s needed first of all is loud, energetic preaching. Why is art—music, for instance—so vital, so popular, and in fact so strong? Because a musician or a singer acts upon thousands at once. Dear, dear art!’’ she went on, looking dreamily at the sky. ‘‘Art gives wings and carries you far, far away! Whoever is sick of filth, of petty pennyworth interests, whoever is outraged, insulted, and indignant, can find peace and satisfaction only in the beautiful.’’
As we drove up to Kurilovka, the weather was clear, joyful. In some yards the threshing was under way, there was a smell of rye straw. Bright red rowanberries showed behind the wattle fences, and the trees all around, wherever you looked, were all gold or red. Bells were ringing in the bell towers, icons were being carried to the school, and they were singing ‘‘The Fervent Intercessor.’’ And how transparent the air, how high the pigeons flew!
A prayer service was held in the schoolroom. Then the Kurilovka peasants presented Masha with an icon, and the Dubechnya peasants with a big plaited bread and a gilded salt cellar. And Masha broke into sobs.
‘‘And if anything unnecessary was said, or there was any displeasure, forgive us,’’ said one old man, and he bowed to her and to me.
As we drove home, Masha kept turning to look back at the school; the green roof, which I had painted, now glistened in the sun, and we could see it for a long time. And I felt that the glances Masha cast at it now were farewell glances.
XVI
IN THE EVENING she got ready for town.
Lately she had often gone to town and spent the night there. In her absence, I was unable to work, my hands would drop and go weak; our big yard seemed a dull, disgusting wasteland, the orchard rustled angrily, and without her, the house, the trees, the horses were, for me, no longer ‘‘ours.’’
I didn’t go anywhere out of the house but kept sitting at her desk, by her bookcase with the books on farming, those former favorites, now no longer needed, looking at me so abashedly. For hours at a time, while it struck seven, eight, nine, while the autumn night, black as soot, was falling outside the windows, I would examine her old glove, or the pen she always wrote with, or her little scissors; I did nothing and was clearly aware that if I had done something before, if I had plowed, mowed, chopped wood, it was only because she wanted it. And if she had sent me to clean a deep well, where I’d have to stand up to my waist in water, I’d have gone into the well, regardless of whether it was necessary or not. But now, when she was not around, Dubechnya, with its decay, unkemptness, banging shutters, thieves by night and by day, seemed to me a chaos in which any work would be useless. And why should I work here, why worry and think about the future, if I felt that the ground was disappearing from under me, that my role here in Dubechnya had been played, in short, that the same lot awaited me as had befallen the books on farming? Oh, what anguish it was at night, in the hours of solitude, when I listened every moment with anxiety, as if waiting for someone to cry out to me that it was time to go. I wasn’t sorry for Dubechnya, I was sorry for my love, whose autumn had obviously also come. What enormous happiness it is to love and be loved, and how terrible to feel that you’re beginning to fall from that high tower!
Masha came back from town the next day towards evening. She was displeased with something but concealed it, and only asked why all the storm windows had been put in— you could suffocate that way. I removed two of the storm windows. We had no wish to eat, but we sat down and had supper.
‘‘Go and wash your hands,’’ said my wife. ‘‘You smell of putty.’’
She brought new illustrated magazines from town, and we looked at them together after supper. Some had supplements with fashion pictures and patterns. Masha gave them a cursory glance and set them aside in order to give them a separate and proper examination later; but one dress with a wide, smooth, bell-shaped skirt and big sleeves caught her interest, and she looked at it seriously and attentively for a moment.
‘‘That’s not bad,’’ she said.
‘‘Yes, that dress would go very well on you,’’ I said. ‘‘Very well!’’
And, looking at the dress with loving emotion, admiring that gray spot only because she liked it, I went on tenderly:
‘‘A wonderful, charming dress! Beautiful, splendid Masha! My dear Masha!’’
And tears dropped on the picture.
‘‘Splendid Masha...’ I murmured. ‘‘Dear, sweet Masha...’
She went and lay down, and I sat for another hour looking at the illustrations.
‘‘You shouldn’t have removed the storm windows,’’ she said from the bedroom. ‘‘I’m afraid it will be cold. Look how it’s blowing!’’
I read here and there in the ‘‘miscellany’’—about how to make cheap ink, and about the world’s biggest diamon
d. I again came upon the fashion picture of the dress she liked, and I imagined her at a ball, with a fan, bare shoulders, brilliant, magnificent, well versed in music and painting and literature, and how small, how brief, my role seemed to me!
Our meeting, this marriage of ours, was only an episode of which this alive, richly endowed woman would have many in her life. All that was best in the world, as I’ve already said, was at her disposal and came to her perfectly gratis, and even ideas and fashionable intellectual trends served for her pleasure, diversifying her life, and I was merely a coachman who drove her from one enthusiasm to another. Now she no longer needed me, she would flutter off, and I would be left alone.
And as if in answer to my thoughts, a desperate cry came from the yard:
‘‘He-e-elp!’’
It was a shrill woman’s voice, and as if wishing to imitate it, the wind in the chimney also howled in a shrill voice. About half a minute went by, and again I heard through the noise of the wind, but as if from the other end of the yard:
‘‘He-e-elp!’’
‘‘Misail, do you hear?’’ my wife asked softly. ‘‘Do you hear?’’
She came out to me from the bedroom in just her night-gown, her hair undone, and listened, looking at the dark window.
‘‘Somebody’s being strangled!’’ she said. ‘‘Just what we needed.’’
I took a gun and went out. It was very dark in the yard, a strong wind was blowing, so that it was hard to stand. I walked to the gate, listened: the trees rustled, the wind whistled, and in the orchard a dog howled lazily, probably the peasant simpleton’s. Beyond the gate it was pitch dark, not a single light on the tracks. And near the wing where the office was last year, there suddenly came a stifled cry:
The Complete Short Novels Page 53