‘Good!’ he said slowly. ‘I’ll tell papa you’re not satisfied with your work.’
He glanced sidelong at the man’s face, and was startled by the impression he had caused. David was smiling miserably and forcedly, and the faces of the others were clouded over. All three went on kneading the clay in silence for a moment. Then David tore his eyes away from his muddy feet and said in a wheedlingly spiteful tone:
‘I was only joking, Volodia.’
‘I’ll tell papa what you said.’ With affronted tears in his eyes for his father and himself, Vladimir walked away.
‘Volodia! Vladimir Sergeivitch!’ David called after him in alarm, and stepped out of the clay, dropping his trousers over his bespattered legs.
Vladimir halted. David ran to him, breathing heavily.
‘Don’t tell your father! Forgive me, fool that I am. True God, I said it without thinking.’
‘All right, I won’t tell him,’ Vladimir replied with a frown, and walked on towards the gate. ‘What did you want to say that for?’ Valet’s bass voice reached his ears. ‘Don’t stir them up, and they won’t trouble you.’
‘The swine!’ Vladimir thought indignantly. ‘Shall I tell father or not?’ Glancing back, he saw David wearing his everlasting smile, and decided: ‘I will tell him!’
Vladimir went up the stairs of the house. Over him swayed the leaves of the wild vine, thickly enlaced in the porch and verandah. He went to his father’s private room and knocked. Sergei Platonovitch was sitting on a cool leather couch, turning over the pages of a June magazine. A yellow bone paper-knife lay at his feet.
‘Well, what do you want?’
‘As I was coming back from the mill,’ Vladimir began uncertainly. But then he recalled David’s dazzling smile, and gazing at his father’s corpulent belly, he resolutely continued:
‘I heard David, the millhand, say …’
Sergei Platonovitch listened attentively to his son’s story, and said: ‘I’ll sack him.’ He bent with a groan to pick up the paper-knife.
Of an evening the intelligentsia of the village were in the habit of gathering at Sergei Mokhov’s house. There was Boyarishkin, a student of the Moscow Technical School; the teacher Balanda, eaten up with conceit and tuberculosis; his assistant and cohabitant, Martha Gerasimovna, a never-ageing girl with her petticoat always showing indecently; the postmaster, a bachelor smelling of sealing-wax and cheap perfumes. Occasionally the young troop commander, Eugene Listnitsky, rode over from his father’s estate. The company would sit drinking tea on the verandah, carrying on a meaningless conversation, and when there was a lull in the talk one of the guests wound up and set going the host’s expensive inlaid gramophone.
On rare occasions, during the great holidays, Sergei Platonovitch liked to cut a dash: he invited guests and regaled them on expensive wines, fresh caviare, and the finest of hors-d’oeuvres. At other times he lived frugally. The one thing in regard to which he exercised no self-restraint was the purchase of books. He loved reading, and had a mind quick to assimilate all he read.
The two village priests, Father Vissarion and Father Pankraty, were not on friendly terms with Sergei Platonovitch. They had a long-standing quarrel with him. Nor were they on very amicable terms with each other. The fractious, intriguing Father Pankraty cleverly perverted his fellow human beings, and the naturally affable, syphilitic widower Father Vissarion, who lived with an Ukrainian housekeeper, held himself aloof, and had no love for Father Pankraty because of his inordinate pride and intriguing character.
All except the teacher Balanda owned their own houses. Mokhov’s blue-painted house stood on the square; right opposite, at the heart of the square, straddled his shop with its glass door and faded signboard. Attached to the shop was a long, low shed with a cellar, and a hundred yards farther on rose the brick wall of the church garden and the church itself with its green, onion-shaped cupola. Beyond the church were the whitewashed, authoritatively severe walls of the school, and two smart-looking houses, one blue, with blue-painted palisades, belonging to Father Pankraty; the other brown (to avoid any resemblance) with carved fencing and a broad balcony, belonging to Father Vissarion. Then came another two-storeyed house, then the post office, the thatched and iron-roofed huts of the cossacks, and finally the sloping back of the mill, with rusty iron cocks on its roof.
The inhabitants of the village lived behind their barred and bolted shutters, cut off from all the rest of the world, both outside and inside the village. Every evening, unless they were paying a visit to a neighbour, each family shot the bolts of their doors, unchained their dogs in the yards, and only the sound of the night watchman disturbed the silence.
One day towards the end of August Mitka Korshunov happened to meet Elizabieta Mokhov down by the river. He had just rowed across from the other side, and as he was fastening up his boat he saw a gaily decorated, light craft skimming the stream. The skiff was being rowed by the young student Boyarishkin. His bare head glistened with perspiration, and the veins stood out on his forehead.
Mitka did not recognize Elizabieta in the skiff at first, for her straw hat threw her face into shadow. Her sunburnt hands were pressing a bunch of yellow waterlilies to her breast.
‘Korshunov!’ she called, as she saw Mitka. ‘You’ve deceived me.’
‘Deceived you?’
‘Don’t you remember, you promised to take me fishing?’
Boyarishkin dropped the oars and straightened his back. The skiff thrust its nose into the shore with a scrunch.
‘Do you remember?’ Elizabieta laughed, as she jumped out.
‘I haven’t had the time. Too much work to do,’ Mitka said apologetically, as the girl approached him.
‘Well, then, when shall we go fishing?’ she asked as she shook his hand.
‘Tomorrow if you like. We’ve done the threshing and I’ve got more time now.’
‘You’re not deceiving me this time?’
‘No, I’m not!’
‘I’ll be waiting for you. You haven’t forgotten the window? I’m going away soon, I expect. And I’d like to go fishing first.’ She was silent a moment, then, smiling to herself, she asked:
‘You’ve had a wedding in your family, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, my sister.’
‘Whom did she marry?’ then, without waiting for an answer, she smiled again mysteriously and fleetingly. ‘Do come, won’t you?’ Once more her smile stung Mitka like a nettle.
He watched her to the boat. Boyarishkin impatiently pushed off, while Elizabieta smilingly gazed across his head at Mitka, and nodded farewell.
When the boat was well out Mitka heard Boyarishkin quietly ask:
‘Who is that lad?’
‘Just an acquaintance,’ she replied.
‘Not an affair of the heart?’
Mitka did not catch her answer above the creak of the rowlocks. He saw Boyarishkin throw himself back with a laugh, but could not see Elizabieta’s face. A lilac ribbon, stirring gently in the breeze, hung from her hat to the slope of her bare neck.
Mitka, who rarely went fishing with rod and line, had never prepared for the occasion with such zeal as on that evening. When he had finished he went into the front room. Grandfather Grishaka was sitting by the window, with round, copper-rimmed spectacles on his nose, studying the Gospels.
‘Grandad!’ Mitka said, leaning his back against the door-frame.
The old man looked at him over his spectacles.
‘Ah?’
‘Wake me up at the first cock.’
‘Where are you off to so early?’
‘Fishing.’
The old man had a weakness for fish, but he made a pretence of opposing Mitka’s designs.
‘Your father said the hemp must be beaten tomorrow. There’s no time to laze around.’
Mitka stirred from the door, and tried strategy.
‘Oh, all right then. I wanted to give you a treat, but as there’s the hemp to be done, I won’t go.’
‘Stop, where are you off to?’ the old man took alarm and drew off his spectacles. ‘I’ll speak to your father. You’ll go. I’ll give you a call.’
At midnight the old man, his linen trousers held up with one hand and his stick gripped in the other, groped his way down the stairs and across the yard to the barn. Mitka was sleeping on a rug in a corn-bin. Grishaka poked at him with his stick, but could not rouse him for some time. At first he poked lightly, whispering:
‘Mitka! Mitka! Hey, Mitka!’
But Mitka only sighed and drew his legs up. Grishaka grew more ruthless and began to bore the stick into Mitka’s stomach. Mitka woke up suddenly and seized the end of the stick.
‘How you do sleep!’ the old man cursed.
The lad made his way quietly out of the yard and hurried to the square. He reached the Mokhovs’ house, set down his fishing tackle, and on tiptoe, so as not to disturb the dogs, crept into the porch. He tried the cold iron latch. The door was shut fast. He clambered across the balustrade of the verandah and went up to the casement window. It was half-closed. Through the black gap came the sweet scent of a warm, womanly body and unfamiliar perfumes.
‘Elizabieta Sergeevna!’
Mitka thought he had called very loudly. He waited. Silence. Supposing he was at the wrong window! What if Mokhov himself was asleep in there! He’d use a gun!
‘Elizabieta Sergeevna, coming fishing?’
If he’d mistaken the window there’d be some fish caught all right!
‘Are you getting up?’ he said, irritatedly, and thrust his head through the window opening.
‘Who’s that?’ a voice sounded quietly and a little alarmed in the darkness.
‘It’s me, Korshunov. Coming fishing?’
‘Ah! One moment!’
There was a sound of movement inside. Her warm, sleepy voice seemed to smell of mint. Mitka saw something white and rustling moving about the room. After a while her smiling face, bound in a white kerchief, appeared at the window.
‘I’m coming out this way. Give me your hand.’ As she squeezed his hand in hers she glanced closely into his eyes.
They went down to the Don. During the night the river had risen, and the boat, which had been left high and dry the evening before, was now rocking on the water a little way out.
‘I’ll have to take off my shoes,’ Elizabieta sighed.
‘Let me carry you,’ Mitka proposed.
‘No, I’d better take my shoes off.’
‘Carrying you would be pleasanter.’
‘I’d rather not,’ she said, with embarrassment in her voice.
Without further argument Mitka embraced her legs above the knees with his left arm, and lifting her easily, splashed through the water. She involuntarily clutched at his stout neck and laughed quietly.
If Mitka had not stumbled over a stone used by the village women when washing clothes, there would not have been a brief, accidental kiss. She groaned and pressed her face against Mitka’s lips, and he came to a halt two paces away from the boat. The water swirled over the legs of his boots and chilled his feet.
Unfastening the boat, he pushed it off and jumped in. He rowed standing. The boat gently breasted the stream, making for the opposite bank. The keel grated on the sandy shore. Without asking permission he picked the girl up in his arms, and carried her into a clump of hawthorn. She bit at his face, scratched, screamed faintly once or twice, and feeling her strength ebbing, she wept angrily, but without tears.
They returned about nine o’clock in the morning. The sky was wrapped in a ruddy yellow haze. A wind was dancing over the river, lashing the waves into foam. The boat danced over the waves, and the ice-cold, sprinkling drops struck Elizabieta’s pallid face and clung to her lashes and the strands of her hair. She wearily screwed up her dreary eyes and listlessly broke the stalk of a flower in her hands. Mitka rowed without looking at her. A small carp and a bream lay at his feet. His face wore an expression of mingled guilt, content and anxiety.
‘I’ll take you to Semionov’s landing-place. It will be nearer for you,’ he told her, as he turned the boat into the stream.
Along the shore the dusty wattle fences pined in the hot wind. The heavy caps of the sunflowers, pecked by sparrows, were completely ripe, and were scattering swollen seeds over the ground. The meadowland was emeralded with newly springing young grass. In the distance stallions were kicking up their heels; the burning southerly wind blew across the river.
As Elizabieta was getting out of the boat Mitka picked up a fish and held it out to her.
‘Here, take your share of the catch,’ he said.
She raised her eyebrows in astonishment, but took the fish.
‘Well, I’m going,’ she replied.
Holding the fish suspended by a twig, she turned miserably away. All her recent assurance and gaiety had been left behind in the hawthorn bush.
‘Elizabieta!’
She turned round, concealing her surprise and irritation. When she came closer, annoyed at his own embarrassment he said:
‘Your dress at the back … there’s a hole in it. It’s quite small …’
She flamed up, blushing down to her collar-bone. After a moment’s silence, Mitka advised her:
‘Go by the back ways.’
‘I’ll have to pass through the square in any case … And I wanted to put my black skirt on,’ she whispered with regret and unexpected hatred in her voice.
‘Shall I green it a bit with a leaf?’ Mitka suggested simply, and was surprised to see the tears come into her eyes.
Like the rustling whisper of a zephyr the news ran through the village. ‘Mitka Korshunov’s been out all night with Sergei Platonovitch’s daughter!’ The women talked about it as they drove out the cattle to join the village herd of a morning, as they stood around the wells, or as they beat out their washing on the flat stones down by the river:
‘Her own mother is dead, you know.’
‘Her father never stops working for a moment, and her stepmother just doesn’t trouble.’
‘The stores watchman says he saw a man tapping at the end window at midnight. He thought at first it was someone trying to break in. He ran to see who it was, and found it was Mitka.’
‘The girls these days, they’re in sin up to their necks. They’re good for nothing.’
‘Mitka told my Michael he is going to marry her.’
‘He forced her, they say.’
‘Ah, my dear, a dog doesn’t worry an unwilling bitch!’
The rumours finally came to the ears of Mokhov himself. They struck him like a beam falling from a building and crushing a man to the ground. For two days he went neither to the stores nor to the mill.
On the third day Sergei Platonovitch had his dappled grey stallion harnessed into his drozhki, and drove to the district centre. The drozhki was followed by a highly lacquered carriage drawn by a pair of prancing black horses. Behind the coachman Elizabieta was sitting. She was as pale as death. She held a light suit-case on her knees and was smiling sadly. At the gate she waved her glove to Vladimir and her stepmother.
Pantaleimon Prokoffievitch happened to be limping out of the stores at the moment, and he stopped to ask the yardman:
‘Where’s the master’s daughter going?’
And Nikita, condescending to the simple human weakness, replied:
‘To Moscow, to school.’
The next day an incident occurred which was long the subject of talk down by the river, around the wells, and when the cattle were being driven out to graze. Just before dusk (the village herd had already returned from the steppe) Mitka went to see Sergei Platonovitch. He had waited until the evening in order to avoid people. He did not go merely to make a friendly call, but to ask for the hand of Mokhov’s daughter Elizabieta.
He had seen her perhaps four times, not more. At the last meeting the conversation had taken the following course:
‘Elizabieta, will you marry me?’
‘Nonsense!’
‘You’re a fool!’
Mitka took umbrage, and said no more. That evening he went home early, and in the morning he announced to his astonished father:
‘Father, arrange for my wedding.’
‘Cross yourself!’ Miron replied.
‘Really, father; I’m not joking.’
‘In a hurry, aren’t you? Who’s caught you, crazy Martha?’
‘Send the matchmakers to Sergei Platonovitch.’
Miron Gregorievitch carefully set down the cobbling tools with which he was mending harness, and roared with laughter.
‘You’re in a funny vein today, my son.’
But Mitka stood to his guns, and his father flared up: ‘You fool! Sergei Platonovich has a capital of over a hundred thousand roubles. He’s a merchant, and what are you? Clear off, or I’ll leather you with this strap.’
‘We’ve got twelve pairs of bullocks, and look at the land we own. Besides, he’s a peasant, and we’re cossacks.’
‘Clear off!’ Miron said curtly.
Mitka found a sympathetic listener only in his grandfather. The old man attempted to persuade Miron in favour of his son’s suit:
‘Miron!’ old Grishaka said. ‘Why don’t you agree? As the boy’s taken it into his head …’
‘Father, you’re a great baby, God’s truth you are! Mitka’s just silly, but you’re …’
‘Hold your tongue!’ Grishaka rapped his stick on the floor. ‘Aren’t we equal to them? He ought to take it as an honour for a cossack’s son to wed his daughter. We’re known all around the countryside. We’re not farmhands, we’re masters. Go and ask him, Miron. Let him give his mill as the dowry.’
Miron flared up again, and went out into the yard. So Mitka decided to wait until evening and then to go to Mokhov himself. He knew that his father’s obstinacy was like an elm at the root: you might bend it, but you could never break it. It wasn’t worth trying.
And Quiet Flows the Don Page 11