When I was doing anything in the garden or the yard, Moisey would
stand beside me, and folding his arms behind his back he would stand
lazily and impudently staring at me with his little eyes. And this
irritated me to such a degree that I threw up my work and went away.
From Stepan we heard that Moisey was Madame Tcheprakov's lover. I
noticed that when people came to her to borrow money they addressed
themselves first to Moisey, and once I saw a peasant, black from
head to foot--he must have been a coalheaver--bow down at
Moisey's feet. Sometimes, after a little whispering, he gave out
money himself, without consulting his mistress, from which I concluded
that he did a little business on his own account.
He used to shoot in our garden under our windows, carried off
victuals from our cellar, borrowed our horses without asking
permission, and we were indignant and began to feel as though
Dubetchnya were not ours, and Masha would say, turning pale:
"Can we really have to go on living with these reptiles another
eighteen months?"
Madame Tcheprakov's son, Ivan, was serving as a guard on our
railway-line. He had grown much thinner and feebler during the
winter, so that a single glass was enough to make him drunk, and
he shivered out of the sunshine. He wore the guard's uniform with
aversion and was ashamed of it, but considered his post a good one,
as he could steal the candles and sell them. My new position excited
in him a mixed feeling of wonder, envy, and a vague hope that
something of the same sort might happen to him. He used to watch
Masha with ecstatic eyes, ask me what I had for dinner now, and his
lean and ugly face wore a sad and sweetish expression, and he moved
his fingers as though he were feeling my happiness with them.
"Listen, Better-than-nothing," he said fussily, relighting his
cigarette at every instant; there was always a litter where he
stood, for he wasted dozens of matches, lighting one cigarette.
"Listen, my life now is the nastiest possible. The worst of it is
any subaltern can shout: 'Hi, there, guard!' I have overheard all
sorts of things in the train, my boy, and do you know, I have learned
that life's a beastly thing! My mother has been the ruin of me! A
doctor in the train told me that if parents are immoral, their
children are drunkards or criminals. Think of that!"
Once he came into the yard, staggering; his eyes gazed about blankly,
his breathing was laboured; he laughed and cried and babbled as
though in a high fever, and the only words I could catch in his
muddled talk were, "My mother! Where's my mother?" which he uttered
with a wail like a child who has lost his mother in a crowd. I led
him into our garden and laid him down under a tree, and Masha and
I took turns to sit by him all that day and all night. He was very
sick, and Masha looked with aversion at his pale, wet face, and
said:
"Is it possible these reptiles will go on living another year and
a half in our yard? It's awful! it's awful!"
And how many mortifications the peasants caused us! How many bitter
disappointments in those early days in the spring months, when we
so longed to be happy. My wife built a school. I drew a plan of a
school for sixty boys, and the Zemstvo Board approved of it, but
advised us to build the school at Kurilovka the big village which
was only two miles from us. Moreover, the school at Kurilovka in
which children--from four villages, our Dubetchnya being one of
the number--were taught, was old and too small, and the floor was
scarcely safe to walk upon. At the end of March at Masha's wish,
she was appointed guardian of the Kurilovka school, and at the
beginning of April we three times summoned the village assembly,
and tried to persuade the peasants that their school was old and
overcrowded, and that it was essential to build a new one. A member
of the Zemstvo Board and the Inspector of Peasant Schools came, and
they, too, tried to persuade them. After each meeting the peasants
surrounded us, begging for a bucket of vodka; we were hot in the
crowd; we were soon exhausted, and returned home dissatisfied and
a little ill at ease. In the end the peasants set apart a plot of
ground for the school, and were obliged to bring all the building
material from the town with their own horses. And the very first
Sunday after the spring corn was sown carts set off from Kurilovka
and Dubetchnya to fetch bricks for the foundations. They set off
as soon as it was light, and came back late in the evening; the
peasants were drunk, and said they were worn out.
As ill-luck would have it, the rain and the cold persisted all
through May. The road was in an awful state: it was deep in mud.
The carts usually drove into our yard when they came back from the
town--and what a horrible ordeal it was. A potbellied horse would
appear at the gate, setting its front legs wide apart; it would
stumble forward before coming into the yard; a beam, nine yards
long, wet and slimy-looking, crept in on a waggon. Beside it, muffled
up against the rain, strode a peasant with the skirts of his coat
tucked up in his belt, not looking where he was going, but stepping
through the puddles. Another cart would appear with boards, then a
third with a beam, a fourth . . . and the space before our house
was gradually crowded up with horses, beams, and planks. Men and
women, with their heads muffled and their skirts tucked up, would
stare angrily at our windows, make an uproar, and clamour for the
mistress to come out to them; coarse oaths were audible. Meanwhile
Moisey stood at one side, and we fancied he was enjoying our
discomfiture.
"We are not going to cart any more," the peasants would shout. "We
are worn out! Let her go and get the stuff herself."
Masha, pale and flustered, expecting every minute that they would
break into the house, would send them out a half-pail of vodka;
after that the noise would subside and the long beams, one after
another, would crawl slowly out of the yard.
When I was setting off to see the building my wife was worried and
said:
"The peasants are spiteful; I only hope they won't do you a mischief.
Wait a minute, I'll come with you."
We drove to Kurilovka together, and there the carpenters asked us
for a drink. The framework of the house was ready. It was time to
lay the foundation, but the masons had not come; this caused delay,
and the carpenters complained. And when at last the masons did come,
it appeared that there was no sand; it had been somehow overlooked
that it would be needed. Taking advantage of our helpless position,
the peasants demanded thirty kopecks for each cartload, though the
distance from the building to the river where they got the sand was
less than a quarter of a mile, and more than five hundred cartloads
were found to be necessary. There was no end to the misunderstandings,
swearing, and importunity; my wife was indignant, and the foreman
of the masons, Tit Petrov, an old man of seventy, took her by the
arm, and said:
"You look here! You look here! You only bring me the sand; I set
ten men on at once, and in two days it will be done! You look here!"
But they brought the sand and two days passed, and four, and a week,
and instead of the promised foundations there was still a yawning
hole.
"It's enough to drive one out of one's senses," said my wife, in
distress. "What people! What people!"
In the midst of these disorderly doings the engineer arrived; he
brought with him parcels of wine and savouries, and after a prolonged
meal lay down for a nap in the verandah and snored so loudly that
the labourers shook their heads and said: "Well!"
Masha was not pleased at his coming, she did not trust him, though
at the same time she asked his advice. When, after sleeping too
long after dinner, he got up in a bad humour and said unpleasant
things about our management of the place, or expressed regret that
he had bought Dubetchnya, which had already been a loss to him,
poor Masha's face wore an expression of misery. She would complain
to him, and he would yawn and say that the peasants ought to be
flogged.
He called our marriage and our life a farce, and said it was a
caprice, a whim.
"She has done something of the sort before," he said about Masha.
"She once fancied herself a great opera singer and left me; I was
looking for her for two months, and, my dear soul, I spent a thousand
roubles on telegrams alone."
He no longer called me a dissenter or Mr. Painter, and did not as
in the past express approval of my living like a workman, but said:
"You are a strange person! You are not a normal person! I won't
venture to prophesy, but you will come to a bad end!"
And Masha slept badly at night, and was always sitting at our bedroom
window thinking. There was no laughter at supper now, no charming
grimaces. I was wretched, and when it rained, every drop that fell
seemed to pierce my heart, like small shot, and I felt ready to
fall on my knees before Masha and apologize for the weather. When
the peasants made a noise in the yard I felt guilty also. For hours
at a time I sat still in one place, thinking of nothing but what a
splendid person Masha was, what a wonderful person. I loved her
passionately, and I was fascinated by everything she did, everything
she said. She had a bent for quiet, studious pursuits; she was fond
of reading for hours together, of studying. Although her knowledge
of farming was only from books she surprised us all by what she
knew; and every piece of advice she gave was of value; not one was
ever thrown away; and, with all that, what nobility, what taste,
what graciousness, that graciousness which is only found in
well-educated people.
To this woman, with her sound, practical intelligence, the disorderly
surroundings with petty cares and sordid anxieties in which we were
living now were an agony: I saw that and could not sleep at night;
my brain worked feverishly and I had a lump in my throat. I rushed
about not knowing what to do.
I galloped to the town and brought Masha books, newspapers, sweets,
flowers; with Stepan I caught fish, wading for hours up to my neck
in the cold water in the rain to catch eel-pout to vary our fare;
I demeaned myself to beg the peasants not to make a noise; I plied
them with vodka, bought them off, made all sorts of promises. And
how many other foolish things I did!
At last the rain ceased, the earth dried. One would get up at four
o'clock in the morning; one would go out into the garden--where
there was dew sparkling on the flowers, the twitter of birds, the
hum of insects, not one cloud in the sky; and the garden, the
meadows, and the river were so lovely, yet there were memories of
the peasants, of their carts, of the engineer. Masha and I drove
out together in the racing droshky to the fields to look at the
oats. She used to drive, I sat behind; her shoulders were raised
and the wind played with her hair.
"Keep to the right!" she shouted to those she met.
"You are like a sledge-driver," I said to her one day.
"Maybe! Why, my grandfather, the engineer's father, was a sledge-driver.
Didn't you know that?" she asked, turning to me, and at once she
mimicked the way sledge-drivers shout and sing.
"And thank God for that," I thought as I listened to her. "Thank
God."
And again memories of the peasants, of the carts, of the engineer. . . .