Peasants and Other Stories

by Anton Chekhov

  After this there was heard a scream such as had never been heard before in Ukleyevo, and no one would have believed that a little weak creature like Lipa could scream like that. And it was suddenly silent in the yard.

  Aksinya walked into the house with her old naive smile. . . . The deaf man kept moving about the yard with his arms full of linen, then he began hanging it up again, in silence, without haste. And until the cook came back from the river no one ventured to go into the kitchen and see what was there.

  8.

  Nikifor was taken to the district hospital, and towards evening he died there. Lipa did not wait for them to come for her but wrapped the dead baby in its little quilt and carried it home.

  The hospital, a new one recently built, with big windows, stood high up on a hill; it was glittering from the setting sun and looked as though it were on fire from inside. There was a little village below. Lipa went down along the road, and, before reaching the village, sat down by a pond. A woman brought a horse down to drink and the horse did not drink.

  “What more do you want?” said the woman to it softly. “What do you want?”

  A boy in a red shirt, sitting at the water’s edge, was washing his father’s boots. And not another soul was in sight either in the village or on the hill.

  “It’s not drinking,” said Lipa, looking at the horse.

  Then the woman with the horse and the boy with the boots walked away, and there was no one left at all. The sun went to bed wrapped in cloth of gold and purple, and long clouds, red and lilac, stretched across the sky, guarded its slumbers. Somewhere far away a bittern cried, a hollow, melancholy sound like a cow shut up in a barn. The cry of that mysterious bird was heard every spring, but no one knew what it was like or where it lived. At the top of the hill by the hospital, in the bushes close to the pond, and in the fields the nightingales were trilling. The cuckoo kept reckoning someone’s years and losing count and beginning again. In the pond the frogs called angrily to one another, straining themselves to bursting, and one could even make out the words: “That’s what you are! That’s what you are!” What a noise there was! It seemed as though all these creatures were singing and shouting so that no one might sleep on that spring night, so that all, even the angry frogs, might appreciate and enjoy every minute: life is given only once.

  A silver half-moon was shining in the sky; there were many stars. Lipa had no idea how long she sat by the pond, but when she got up and walked on everybody was asleep in the little village, and there was not a single light. It was probably about nine miles’ walk home, but she had not the strength, she had not the power to think how to go: the moon gleamed now in front, now on the right, and the same cuckoo kept calling in a voice grown husky, with a chuckle as though gibing at her: “Oy, look out, you’ll lose your way!” Lipa walked rapidly; she lost the kerchief from her head . . . she looked at the sky and wondered where her baby’s soul was now: was it following her, or floating aloft yonder among the stars and thinking nothing now of his mother? Oh, how lonely it was in the open country at night, in the midst of that singing when one cannot sing oneself; in the midst of the incessant cries of joy when one cannot oneself be joyful, when the moon, which cares not whether it is spring or winter, whether men are alive or dead, looks down as lonely, too. . . . When there is grief in the heart it is hard to be without people. If only her mother Praskovya had been with her, or Crutch, or the cook, or some peasant!

  “Boo-oo!” cried the bittern. “Boo-oo!”

  And suddenly she heard clearly the sound of human speech:

  “Put the horses in, Vavila!”

  By the wayside a campfire was burning ahead of her: the flames had died down, there were only red embers. She could hear the horses munching. In the darkness she could see the outlines of two carts, one with a barrel, the other, a lower one with sacks in it, and the figures of two men; one was leading a horse to put it into the shafts, the other was standing motionless by the fire with his hands behind his back. A dog growled by the carts. The one who was leading the horse stopped and said:

  “It seems as though someone were coming along the road.”

  “Sharik, be quiet!” the other called to the dog.

  And from the voice one could tell that the second was an old man. Lipa stopped and said:

  “God help you.”

  The old man went up to her and answered not immediately:

  “Good evening!”

  “Your dog does not bite, grandfather?”

  “No, come along, he won’t touch you.”

  “I have been at the hospital,” said Lipa after a pause. “My little son died there. Here I am carrying him home.”

  It must have been unpleasant for the old man to hear this, for he moved away and said hurriedly:

  “Never mind, my dear. It’s God’s will. You are very slow, lad,” he added, addressing his companion; “look alive!”

  “Your yoke’s nowhere,” said the young man; “it is not to be seen.”

  “You are a regular, Vavila.”

  The old man picked up an ember, blew on it—only his eyes and nose were lighted up—then, when they had found the yoke, he went with the light to Lipa and looked at her, and his look expressed compassion and tenderness.

  “You are a mother,” he said; “every mother grieves for her child.”

  And he sighed and shook his head as he said it. Vavila threw something on the fire, stamped on it—and at once it was very dark; the vision vanished, and as before there were only the fields, the sky with the stars, and the noise of the birds hindering each other from sleep. And the land rail called, it seemed, in the very place where the fire had been.

  But a minute passed, and again she could see the two carts and the old man and lanky Vavila. The carts creaked as they went out on the road.

  “Are you holy men?” Lipa asked the old man.

  “No. We are from Firsanovo.”

  “You looked at me just now and my heart was softened. And the young man is so gentle. I thought you must be holy men.”

  “Are you going far?”

  “To Ukleyevo.”

  “Get in, we will give you a lift as far as Kuzmenki, then you go straight on and we turn off to the left.”

  Vavila got into the cart with the barrel and the old man and Lipa got into the other. They moved at a walking pace, Vavila in front.

  “My baby was in torment all day,” said Lipa. “He looked at me with his little eyes and said nothing; he wanted to speak and could not. Holy Father, Queen of Heaven! In my grief I kept falling down on the floor. I stood up and fell down by the bedside. And tell me, grandfather, why a little thing should be tormented before his death? When a grown-up person, a man or woman, is in torment his sins are forgiven, but why a little thing, when he has no sins? Why?”

  “Who can tell?” answered the old man.

  They drove on for half an hour in silence.

  “We can’t know everything, how and wherefore,” said the old man. “It is ordained for the bird to have not four wings but two because it is able to fly with two; and so it is ordained for man not to know everything but only a half or a quarter. As much as he needs to know so as to live, so much he knows.”

  “It is better for me to go on foot, grandfather. Now my heart is all of a tremble.”

  “Never mind, sit still.”

  The old man yawned and made the sign of the cross over his mouth.

  “Never mind,” he repeated. “Yours is not the worst of sorrows. Life is long, there will be good and bad to come, there will be everything. Great is Mother Russia,” he said, and looked round on each side of him. “I have been all over Russia, and I have seen everything in her, and you may believe my words, my dear. There will be good and there will be bad. I went as a delegate from my village to Siberia, and I have been to the Amur River and the Altai Mountains and I settled in Siberia; I worked the land there, then I was homesick for Mother Russia and I came back to my native village. We came back to Russia on foot; an
d I remember we went on a steamer, and I was thin as thin, all in rags, barefoot, freezing with cold, and gnawing a crust, and a gentleman who was on the steamer—the Kingdom of Heaven be his if he is dead—looked at me pitifully, and the tears came into his eyes. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘your bread is black, your days are black. . . .’ And when I got home, as the saying is, there was neither stick nor stall; I had a wife, but I left her behind in Siberia, she was buried there. So I am living as a day laborer. And yet I tell you: since then I have had good as well as bad. Here I do not want to die, my dear, I would be glad to live another twenty years; so there has been more of the good. And great is our Mother Russia!” and again he gazed to each side and looked round.

  “Grandfather,” Lipa asked, “when anyone dies, how many days does his soul walk the earth?”

  “Who can tell! Ask Vavila here, he has been to school. Now they teach them everything. Vavila!” the old man called to him.

  “Yes!”

  “Vavila, when anyone dies how long does his soul walk the earth?”

  Vavila stopped the horse and only then answered:

  “Nine days. My uncle Kirilla died and his soul lived in our hut thirteen days after.”

  “How do you know?”

  “For thirteen days there was a knocking in the stove.”

  “Well, that’s all right. Go on,” said the old man, and it could be seen that he did not believe a word of all that.

  Near Kuzmenki the cart turned into the highroad while Lipa went straight on. It was by now getting light. As she went down into the ravine the Ukleyevo huts and the church were hidden in fog. It was cold, and it seemed to her that the same cuckoo was calling still.

  When Lipa reached home the cattle had not yet been driven out; everyone was asleep. She sat down on the steps and waited. The old man was the first to come out; he understood all that had happened from the first glance at her, and for a long time he could not articulate a word, but only moved his lips without a sound.

  “Ech, Lipa,” he said, “you did not take care of my grandchild. . . .”

  Varvara was awakened. She clasped her hands and broke into sobs, and immediately began laying out the baby.

  “And he was a pretty child . . .” she said. “Oh dear, dear. . . . You only had the one child, and you did not take care enough of him, you silly girl. . . .”

  There was a requiem service in the morning and the evening. The funeral took place the next day, and after it the guests and the priests ate a great deal, and with such greed that one might have thought that they had not tasted food for a long time. Lipa waited at table, and the priest, lifting his fork on which there was a salted mushroom, said to her:

  “Don’t grieve for the babe. For of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

  And only when they had all separated, Lipa realized fully that there was no Nikifor and never would be, she realized it and broke into sobs. And she did not know what room to go into to sob, for she felt that now that her child was dead there was no place for her in the house, that she had no reason to be here, that she was in the way; and the others felt it, too.

  “Now what are you bellowing for?” Aksinya shouted, suddenly appearing in the doorway; in honor of the funeral she was dressed all in new clothes and had powdered her face. “Shut up!”

  Lipa tried to stop but could not and sobbed louder than ever.

  “Do you hear?” shouted Aksinya, and she stamped her foot in violent anger. “Who is it I am speaking to? Go out of the yard and don’t set foot here again, you convict’s wife. Get away.”

  “There, there, there,” the old man put in fussily. “Aksinya, don’t make such an outcry, my girl. . . . She is crying, it is only natural . . . her child is dead. . . .”

  “ ‘It is only natural,’ ” Aksinya mimicked him. “Let her stay the night here, and don’t let me see a trace of her here tomorrow! ‘It is only natural’!” she mimicked him again, and, laughing, she went into the shop.

  Early the next morning Lipa went off to her mother at Torguevo.

  9.

  At the present time the steps and the front door of the shop have been repainted and are as bright as though they were new, there are gay geraniums in the windows as of old, and what happened in Tsybukin’s house and yard three years ago is almost forgotten.

  Grigory Petrovich is looked upon as the master as he was in old days, but in reality everything has passed into Aksinya’s hands; she buys and sells, and nothing can be done without her consent. The brickyard is working well; and as bricks are wanted for the railway the price has gone up to twenty-four rubles a thousand; peasant women and girls cart the bricks to the station and load them up in the trucks and earn a quarter ruble a day for the work.

  Aksinya has gone into partnership with the Khrymin Juniors, and their factory is now called Khrymin Juniors and Co. They have opened a tavern near the station, and now the expensive concertina is played not at the factory but at the tavern, and the head of the post office often goes there, and he, too, is engaged in some sort of traffic, and the stationmaster, too. Khrymin Juniors have presented the deaf man Stepan with a gold watch, and he is constantly taking it out of his pocket and putting it to his ear.

  People say of Aksinya that she has become a person of power; and it is true that when she drives in the morning to her brickyard, handsome and happy, with the naive smile on her face, and afterwards when she is giving orders there, one is aware of great power in her. Everyone is afraid of her in the house and in the village and in the brickyard. When she goes to the post the head of the postal department jumps up and says to her:

  “I humbly beg you to be seated, Aksinya Abramovna!”

  A certain landowner, middle-aged but foppish, in a tunic of fine cloth and patent leather high boots, sold her a horse, and was so carried away by talking to her that he knocked down the price to meet her wishes. He held her hand a long time and, looking into her merry, sly, naive eyes, said:

  “For a woman like you, Aksinya Abramovna, I should be ready to do anything you please. Only say when we can meet where no one will interfere with us?”

  “Why, when you please.”

  And since then the elderly fop drives up to the shop almost every day to drink beer. And the beer is horrid, bitter as wormwood. The landowner shakes his head, but he drinks it.

  Old Tsybukin does not have anything to do with the business now at all. He does not keep any money because he cannot distinguish between the good and the false, but he is silent, he says nothing of this weakness. He has become forgetful, and if they don’t give him food he does not ask for it. They have grown used to having dinner without him, and Varvara often says:

  “He went to bed again yesterday without any supper.”

  And she says it unconcernedly because she is used to it. For some reason, summer and winter alike, he wears a fur coat, and only in very hot weather he does not go out but sits at home. As a rule, putting on his fur coat, wrapping it round him and turning up his collar, he walks about the village, along the road to the station, or sits from morning till night on the seat near the church gates. He sits there without stirring. Passersby bow to him, but he does not respond, for as of old he dislikes the peasants. If he is asked a question he answers quite rationally and politely, but briefly.

  There is a rumor going about in the village that his daughter-in-law turns him out of the house and gives him nothing to eat, and that he is fed by charity; some are glad, others are sorry for him.

  Varvara has grown even fatter and whiter, and as before she is active in good works, and Aksinya does not interfere with her.

  There is so much jam now that they have not time to eat it before the fresh fruit comes in; it goes sugary, and Varvara almost sheds tears, not knowing what to do with it.

  They have begun to forget about Anisim. A letter has come from him written in verse on a big sheet of paper as though it were a petition, all in the same splendid handwriting. Evidently his friend Samorodov is sharing his punishment. Under the v
erses in an ugly, scarcely legible handwriting there was a single line: “I am ill here all the time; I am wretched, for Christ’s sake help me!”

  Towards evening—it was a fine autumn day—old Tsybukin was sitting near the church gates, with the collar of his fur coat turned up and nothing of him could be seen but his nose and the peak of his cap. At the other end of the long seat was sitting Elizarov, the contractor, and beside him Yakov, the school watchman, a toothless old man of seventy. Crutch and the watchman were talking.

  “Children ought to give food and drink to the old. . . . Honor thy father and mother . . .” Yakov was saying with irritation, “while she, this daughter-in-law, has turned her father-in-law out of his own house; the old man has neither food nor drink; where is he to go? He has not had a morsel for these three days.”

  “Three days!” said Crutch, amazed.

  “Here he sits and does not say a word. He has grown feeble. And why be silent? He ought to prosecute her, they wouldn’t flatter her in the police court.”

  “Wouldn’t flatter whom?” asked Crutch, not hearing.

  “What?”

  “The woman’s all right, she does her best. In their line of business they can’t get on without that . . . without sin, I mean. . . .”

  “From his own house,” Yakov went on with irritation. “Save up and buy your own house, then turn people out of it! She is a nice one, to be sure! A pla-ague!”

  Tsybukin listened and did not stir.

  “Whether it is your own house or others’ it makes no difference so long as it is warm and the women don’t scold . . .” said Crutch, and he laughed. “When I was young I was very fond of my Nastasya. She was a quiet woman. And she used to be always at it: ‘Buy a house, Makarich! Buy a house, Makarich! Buy a house, Makarich!’ She was dying and yet she kept on saying, ‘Buy yourself a racing droshky, Makarich, that you may not have to walk.’ And I bought her nothing but gingerbread.”

  “Her husband’s deaf and stupid,” Yakov went on, not hearing Crutch; “a regular fool, just like a goose. He can’t understand anything. Hit a goose on the head with a stick and even then it does not understand.”