“Who told you?”
“I heard someone read it in the newspaper at Ivan Ionov’s tavern.”
There followed another long silence. Maria Vasilyevna thought about her school, and the examinations which would soon be coming along, and the four boys and one girl who would take part in them. She was still pondering these examinations when they were overtaken by a man driving in a carriage harnessed to four horses. The man was a landowner called Khanov, and he had in fact been the examiner at her school the year before. He drew alongside, recognized her, and bowed.
“Good morning,” he said. “I reckon you must be on your way home.”
Khanov was a man about forty years old, with a languid air and a face which showed signs of wear; he was rapidly aging, though he was still handsome and attractive to women. He lived alone on a large estate, and took no part in government service; they said he did nothing at home except whistle as he paced up and down the room, or else he played chess with an old footman. They said, too, that he drank a great deal. Indeed, during the examinations the year before, the very papers he brought with him smelled of wine and perfume. On that occasion he was dressed in brand-new clothes, and Maria Vasilyevna thought him very attractive: she was embarrassed and confused when she sat beside him. She was accustomed to receiving the visits of chilling, hardheaded examiners, but this particular examiner could not remember a single prayer, did not know what questions to ask, and was extraordinarily courteous and kind, giving all the children good marks.
“I am going to visit Bakvist,” he went on, still addressing Maria Vasilyevna, “but it occurs to me that he may not be at home.”
They turned off the highway into a narrow lane, Khanov leading the way and Semyon coming up behind. The four-horse team moved at a walking pace, straining to drag the heavy carriage out of the mud. Semyon followed a more erratic course, leaving the road to avoid a hump in his path or to skirt a puddle, and sometimes he would jump down from the cart to help the horse. Maria Vasilyevna was still thinking about the school: she was wondering whether the questions at the examination would be difficult or easy. Also, she was annoyed with the zemstvo council, which she had visited the previous day only to find no one there. What lack of principle! For the last two years she had been asking them to dismiss the janitor, who did nothing, was rude to her, and beat up the school children; but no one paid any attention to her. The chairman of the board was rarely at the office, and when he was, he would say with tears in his eyes that he had no time to spare; the inspector visited the school once in three years and knew nothing about the business, having previously served in the excise department and having received his present post through patronage. The school board rarely met, no one knew where. The trustee was an almost illiterate peasant who owned a tannery: a coarse, stupid fellow, bosom companion to the janitor—only God knew to whom she should turn when there were complaints to be made or wrongs to be put right.
“He really is handsome,” she thought, glancing at Khanov.
The road was becoming worse and worse.… They drove into the forest. Here there was no possibility of leaving the road, the ruts were deep, and water flowed and gurgled through them. Sharp twigs struck across their faces.
“What a road, eh?” Khanov said, and laughed.
The schoolmistress gazed at him, wondering why the strange fellow ever came to live here. What good was this God-forsaken place with its mud and boredom to a man of wealth and refinement and an attractive presence? Life was granting him no special privileges here. Like Semyon, he was jogging along slowly over an appalling road, enduring exactly the same hardships. Why live here, when there was the possibility of living in St. Petersburg or abroad? One would have thought it a simple matter for a rich man to build a fine road instead of this awful one; in this way he would avoid all the horror of the journey and the sight of the despair written on the faces of Semyon and of his own coachman. But he only laughed; apparently it was all one to him, and he wanted no better life. He was kind, gentle, unsophisticated, and was ignorant of the hard facts of life just as he was ignorant of the proper prayers to be offered at an examination. His only gifts to the school were globes; therefore he sincerely came to regard himself as a useful person and a prominent fighter for the cause of popular education. And what use were his globes anyway?
“Sit tight, Vasilyevna!” Semyon shouted.
The cart lurched violently, and was on the point of upsetting. Something heavy hurtled down on Maria Vasilyevna’s feet—the purchases she had made in town. There followed a steep climb up a clayey hill, with streams of water roaring down winding ditches and gnawing the road away—how could one possibly climb the hill? The horses were breathing heavily. Khanov got out of his carriage and walked along the edge of the road in his long overcoat. He was hot.
“What a road, eh?” he exclaimed, and laughed again. “Soon the whole carriage will be smashed to bits!”
“Who told you to go driving about in this weather?” Semyon said sharply. “Why didn’t you stay at home?”
“It’s boring to stay at home, old fellow. I don’t like it.”
He looked strong and well built as he walked beside old Semyon, but there was something barely perceptible in his gait which revealed a person already touched by decay, weak, and nearing his end. The forest suddenly smelled of wine. Maria Vasilyevna shuddered, and began to feel pity for this man who was going to ruin for no good reason, and it occurred to her that if she were his wife or sister she would devote her whole life to saving him. His wife? But he had so ordered his life that he had come to live alone on a vast estate, while she lived out her life in an obscure little village, and so the mere thought of them meeting as equals and becoming intimate seemed impossible and absurd. In reality, life was so ordered and human relationships were so infinitely various and complex that if you thought about them at all, you would be overwhelmed with terror and your heart would stop beating!
“It is beyond all understanding,” she thought, “why God gives beauty and charm and gentle, melancholy eyes to weak, unhappy, useless mortals—why are they so charming?”
“I’ll be turning off to the right here,” Khanov said, jumping into his carriage. “Good-by, and a pleasant journey to you!”
And now once again she thought of her pupils, of the examination, of the janitor and the school board; and when the wind blowing from the right brought her the rumbling of the departing carriage, these thoughts were mingled with others. She wanted to dream of his beautiful eyes, of love, of the happiness that would never come to her.
And if she became his wife! It was cold in the morning, there was no one to heat the stove, the janitor was away somewhere, and the school children came in as soon as it was light, making a good deal of noise, bringing in mud and snow. Everything was so bleak and uncomfortable. Her quarters consisted of one little room and a kitchen. Every day after school hours she had a headache, and after dinner a burning sensation over her heart. She had to collect money from the children for firewood and for the janitor, and this money had to be turned over to the trustee, and then she had to implore this man—this insolent, overstuffed peasant—for God’s sake to send her some of the firewood. At night she dreamed of examinations, peasants, snowdrifts. This life had aged and coarsened her, making her ugly, awkward, and gaunt, so that she looked as though lead had been poured into her veins. She was afraid of everything, and always stood up in the presence of the trustee or a member of the zemstvo council, and when she had cause to mention any of them she always referred to them deferentially, never using their names; it was always “they said this, they did that.” No one found her attractive, and life continued to be boring, with no show of affection, no friendly sharing of interests, no interesting acquaintances. In her situation, how terrible it would be if she fell in love!
“Sit tight, Vasilyevna!”
Once again there was another steep climb.
She had become a schoolteacher out of necessity, without any vocation for it. She ha
d in fact never thought of a vocation, or of the usefulness of education: the most important part of her work, she thought, lay not in the children or in enlightening their minds, but in examinations. And when, pray, did she ever have time to think of a vocation or of the advantages of education? Schoolteachers and ill-paid doctors and their assistants, for all their arduous work, never have even the consolation of thinking they are serving the people or an idea—they are thinking about the next crust of bread, about firewood, about bad roads, about illnesses. Their lives are hard and uninteresting, and only plodding silent cart horses like Maria Vasilyevna can bear such servitude for long. Lively, sensitive, impressionable people who talk of a vocation and service to an idea soon grow weary and throw up the task.
To find the driest and shortest road Semyon sometimes struck out across a meadow or behind cottages, but the peasants would not always let him pass: if he came to priests’ land, there would be no free passage, and it was the same when he came to a plot of land which Ivan Ionov had bought from a landowner and surrounded with a ditch. In each case they had to turn back.
They reached Nizhneye Gorodishche. Near the tavern horse-carts loaded with great bottles of sulfuric acid stood about the dung-strewn earth, still covered with snow. There were a great many people in the tavern, all of them drivers, and the place smelled of vodka, tobacco, and sheepskins. The roar of conversation was sometimes interrupted by the banging of a swing door. The sound of an accordion came through the partition wall, an endless sound. Maria Vasilyevna sat down and drank her tea, while the peasants at the next table swilled down vodka and beer, perspiring freely from the tea they had already drunk and the suffocating heat of the tavern.
Voices kept shouting confusedly: “Did you hear that, Kuzma?” “What’s up, eh?” “Lord save us!” “Ivan Dementyich, I’ll get you!” “Look there, brother!”
A very small pock-marked peasant with a black beard, quite drunk, was suddenly surprised by something or other, and exploded into a torrent of foul language.
“What do you mean by all that dirty language, eh?” Semyon shouted angrily. He was sitting at the far end of the room. “Can’t you see there’s a young lady present?”
“What’s that, a young lady, eh?” someone jeered from another corner.
“What a swine!”
“I didn’t mean any harm,” the very small peasant said confusedly. “Excuse me. I lays down my money, and the young lady lays hers. Good morning, ma’am.”
“Good morning,” replied the schoolteacher.
“Very well, thank you kindly.”
Maria Vasilyevna enjoyed her tea, and soon her face was as red as the others, and once more she fell to thinking about the janitor, about firewood.…
She heard a voice from the next table: “Just look over there, brother. That’s the schoolmistress from Vyazovye. I recognize her. She’s a fine young lady.…”
“She’s all right.”
The swing door was continually banging, and people were continually coming in and going out. Maria Vasilyevna sat there absorbed in her thoughts, but the accordion on the other side of the wall kept playing and playing. Patches of sunlight which had lain on the floor when she came in moved up to the counter, then up the wall, and then vanished altogether: it meant it was now afternoon. The peasants at the next table were getting ready to go. The very small peasant went up to Maria Vasilyevna, swaying slightly. He thrust out his hand; and seeing him, all the other peasants came up to her and shook hands and went out one by one. The door banged and whined nine times.
“Vasilyevna, get ready!” Semyon called to her.
They drove away, and again the horse went at a walking pace.
“A while back they were building a school here in their Nizhneye Gorodishche,” said Semyon, turning round. “And they did something wicked.”
“What did they do?”
“The chairman put a thousand in his pocket, and the trustee put a thousand, and the teacher put five hundred.”
“You shouldn’t slander people, grandfather. The whole school only cost a thousand. It’s all nonsense what you say!”
“I wouldn’t know.… I’m only telling you what they tell me.”
It was quite clear that Semyon did not believe the schoolmistress. The peasants, too, did not believe her. They always thought her salary was too large, twenty-one rubles a month-five rubles, in their estimation, would have been sufficient—and they thought she kept the greater part of the money she received for firewood and for the janitor. The trustee thought like the rest, though he made a profit out of the firewood and received a salary from the peasants for acting as trustee, and all this in secret without the knowledge of the authorities.
But now, thank God, they had left the forest behind them, and it was level ground all the way to Vyazovye. They had only a little further to go—a river to cross, then a railroad track, and then they would be in Vyazovye.
“Where are you going now?” Maria Vasilyevna asked Semyon. “Why don’t you take the road to the right across the bridge?”
“What’s wrong with this road? The water’s not very deep.”
“Be careful you don’t drown the horse!”
“What’s that?”
“Why, there’s Khanov driving over the bridge,” Maria Vasilyevna said, seeing the carriage and four horses far to the right. “It is him, isn’t it?”
“It’s him for sure. Reckon he didn’t find Bakvist at home after all. God in heaven, he’s a fool to drive all that way, when it’s all of two miles nearer this way.”
They came to the river. In summer the river was only a shallow stream which you could walk across easily. Usually in August it was dried up, but now, after the spring floods, it had grown to be a torrent of swift, cold, muddy water fifty feet wide. There were fresh wheel tracks visible on the bank up to the water’s edge: evidently carts had been going over.
“Giddap!” Semyon shouted angrily and anxiously, tugging violently at the reins and flapping his arms like a pair of wings. “Giddap!”
The horse waded into the water up to his belly, stopped, and then plunged on again, straining to the utmost, and Maria Vasilyevna felt the shock of cold water lapping her feet.
“Get up!” she shouted, rising to her feet. “Get up!”
They came to the opposite bank.
“What a business, eh? Good Lord!” muttered Semyon, setting the harness straight. “Those zemstvo people plague the devil out of us!”
Her shoes and galoshes were full of water; the hem of her skirt and her coat and one sleeve were drenched and dripping. The bags of sugar and flour she had bought were soaked, and this was harder to bear than all the rest. In her despair Maria Vasilyevna only clasped her hands together and murmured: “Oh, Semyon, Semyon, how could you … really?”
The barrier was down at the railroad crossing: an express train was leaving the station. Maria Vasilyevna stood at the crossing waiting for the train to pass, her whole body trembling with cold. From where they were, they could see Vyazovye, the green roof over the school and the church with the blazing crosses reflecting the rays of the setting sun; and the station windows were also ablaze, and rose-colored smoke came from the engine.… And it seemed to her that everything in the world was shivering with cold.
At last the train appeared, the windows aflame like the crosses on the church: it made her eyes ache to look at them. Maria Vasilyevna caught a quick glimpse of a lady standing on the platform of a first-class carriage. It was her mother! There was an extraordinary resemblance. The same glorious hair, the same forehead, the same inclination of the head. With amazing clarity, for the first time in thirty years, there came to her vivid images of her mother, her father, her brother, their apartment in Moscow, the aquarium with the little fishes, everything to the smallest detail. There came to her the sound of someone playing on the grand piano, and the voice of her father, and she saw herself young and pretty and well dressed in a warm and brilliantly lit room, with her whole family around her. A gr
eat joy and happiness welled up in her heart, and she pressed her hands to her temples in rapture, crying softly and imploringly: “Mother!”
And she began to cry, for no reason. At that moment Khanov drove up with his four-in-hand, and seeing him, she imagined such happiness as had never been, and she smiled and nodded to him as though they possessed equal stations in life and were intimate with one another, and it seemed to her that the whole sky, the trees, and all the windows were glowing with her happiness and her triumph. No! Her father and mother had never died, and she herself had never been a schoolteacher: there had been a long, strange, tortured dream, but now she was wide awake.
“Vasilyevna, get up in the cart!”
Suddenly it all vanished. The barrier slowly rose. Trembling, numb with cold, Maria Vasilyevna took her place in the cart. The carriage with the four horses crossed the railroad track, and Semyon followed it. The guard at the crossing lifted his cap.
“Here is Vyazovye! We have arrived!”
1897
On Love
AT breakfast the next day they served very tasty pirozhki, crayfish, and mutton cutlets, and while we were eating, Nicanor the cook came in to ask what the guests would like for dinner. He was a man of middle height with a puffy face and small eyes, and though clean-shaven he somehow looked as though his mustache had been plucked rather than shaved.
Alyokhin told us that the beautiful Pelageya was in love with Nicanor. As he was a drunkard with a violent temper, she did not want him for a husband, but was prepared to live with him. He was a very devout man, and his religious convictions did not permit him to live in this way, and so he insisted upon marriage and refused any other solution, and when he was drunk he used to curse her and even beat her. Sometimes she would hide upstairs and fall into fits of weeping, and on such occasions Alyokhin and the servants remained in the house to defend her if it should become necessary.
They started talking about love.
Forty Stories Page 29