Dr. Blagovo arrived on his bicycle. My sister began coming often.
Again there were conversations about manual labour, about progress,
about a mysterious millennium awaiting mankind in the remote future.
The doctor did not like our farmwork, because it interfered with
arguments, and said that ploughing, reaping, grazing calves were
unworthy of a free man, and all these coarse forms of the struggle
for existence men would in time relegate to animals and machines,
while they would devote themselves exclusively to scientific
investigation. My sister kept begging them to let her go home
earlier, and if she stayed on till late in the evening, or spent
the night with us, there would be no end to the agitation.
"Good Heavens, what a baby you are still!" said Masha reproachfully.
"It is positively absurd."
"Yes, it is absurd," my sister agreed, "I know it's absurd; but
what is to be done if I haven't the strength to get over it? I keep
feeling as though I were doing wrong."
At haymaking I ached all over from the unaccustomed labour; in the
evening, sitting on the verandah and talking with the others, I
suddenly dropped asleep, and they laughed aloud at me. They waked
me up and made me sit down to supper; I was overpowered with
drowsiness and I saw the lights, the faces, and the plates as it
were in a dream, heard the voices, but did not understand them. And
getting up early in the morning, I took up the scythe at once, or
went to the building and worked hard all day.
When I remained at home on holidays I noticed that my sister and
Masha were concealing something from me, and even seemed to be
avoiding me. My wife was tender to me as before, but she had thoughts
of her own apart, which she did not share with me. There was no
doubt that her exasperation with the peasants was growing, the life
was becoming more and more distasteful to her, and yet she did not
complain to me. She talked to the doctor now more readily than she
did to me, and I did not understand why it was so.
It was the custom in our province at haymaking and harvest time for
the labourers to come to the manor house in the evening and be
regaled with vodka; even young girls drank a glass. We did not keep
up this practice; the mowers and the peasant women stood about in
our yard till late in the evening expecting vodka, and then departed
abusing us. And all the time Masha frowned grimly and said nothing,
or murmured to the doctor with exasperation: "Savages! Petchenyegs!"
In the country newcomers are met ungraciously, almost with hostility,
as they are at school. And we were received in this way. At first
we were looked upon as stupid, silly people, who had bought an
estate simply because we did not know what to do with our money.
We were laughed at. The peasants grazed their cattle in our wood
and even in our garden; they drove away our cows and horses to the
village, and then demanded money for the damage done by them. They
came in whole companies into our yard, and loudly clamoured that
at the mowing we had cut some piece of land that did not belong to
us; and as we did not yet know the boundaries of our estate very
accurately, we took their word for it and paid damages. Afterwards
it turned out that there had been no mistake at the mowing. They
barked the lime-trees in our wood. One of the Dubetchnya peasants,
a regular shark, who did a trade in vodka without a licence, bribed
our labourers, and in collaboration with them cheated us in a most
treacherous way. They took the new wheels off our carts and replaced
them with old ones, stole our ploughing harness and actually sold
them to us, and so on. But what was most mortifying of all was what
happened at the building; the peasant women stole by night boards,
bricks, tiles, pieces of iron. The village elder with witnesses
made a search in their huts; the village meeting fined them two
roubles each, and afterwards this money was spent on drink by the
whole commune.
When Masha heard about this, she would say to the doctor or my
sister indignantly:
"What beasts! It's awful! awful!"
And I heard her more than once express regret that she had ever
taken it into her head to build the school.
"You must understand," the doctor tried to persuade her, "that if
you build this school and do good in general, it's not for the sake
of the peasants, but in the name of culture, in the name of the
future; and the worse the peasants are the more reason for building
the school. Understand that!"
But there was a lack of conviction in his voice, and it seemed to
me that both he and Masha hated the peasants.
Masha often went to the mill, taking my sister with her, and they
both said, laughing, that they went to have a look at Stepan, he
was so handsome. Stepan, it appeared, was torpid and taciturn only
with men; in feminine society his manners were free and easy, and
he talked incessantly. One day, going down to the river to bathe,
I accidentally overheard a conversation. Masha and Kleopatra, both
in white dresses, were sitting on the bank in the spreading shade
of a willow, and Stepan was standing by them with his hands behind
his back, and was saying:
"Are peasants men? They are not men, but, asking your pardon, wild
beasts, impostors. What life has a peasant? Nothing but eating and
drinking; all he cares for is victuals to be cheaper and swilling
liquor at the tavern like a fool; and there's no conversation, no
manners, no formality, nothing but ignorance! He lives in filth,
his wife lives in filth, and his children live in filth. What he
stands up in, he lies down to sleep in; he picks the potatoes out
of the soup with his fingers; he drinks kvass with a cockroach in
it, and doesn't bother to blow it away!"
"It's their poverty, of course," my sister put in.
"Poverty? There is want to be sure, there's different sorts of want,
Madam. If a man is in prison, or let us say blind or crippled, that
really is trouble I wouldn't wish anyone, but if a man's free and
has all his senses, if he has his eyes and his hands and his strength
and God, what more does he want? It's cockering themselves, and
it's ignorance, Madam, it's not poverty. If you, let us suppose,
good gentlefolk, by your education, wish out of kindness to help
him he will drink away your money in his low way; or, what's worse,
he will open a drinkshop, and with your money start robbing the
people. You say poverty, but does the rich peasant live better? He,
too, asking your pardon, lives like a swine: coarse, loud-mouthed,
cudgel-headed, broader than he is long, fat, red-faced mug, I'd
like to swing my fist and send him flying, the scoundrel. There's
Larion, another rich one at Dubetchnya, and I bet he strips the
bark off your trees as much as any poor one; and he is a foul-mouthed
fellow; his children are the same, and when he has had a drop too
much he'll topple with his nose in a puddle and sleep there. They
are all a worthless lot, Madam. If you live in a village with them
it is like hell. It has stuck in my teeth, that village has, and
thank the Lord, the King of Heaven, I've plenty to eat and clothes
to wear, I served out my time in the dragoons, I was village elder
for three years, and now I am a free Cossack, I live where I like.
I don't want to live in the village, and no one has the right to
force me. They say--my wife. They say you are bound to live in
your cottage with your wife. But why so? I am not her hired man."
"Tell me, Stepan, did you marry for love?" asked Masha.
"Love among us in the village!" answered Stepan, and he gave a
laugh. "Properly speaking, Madam, if you care to know, this is my
second marriage. I am not a Kurilovka man, I am from Zalegoshtcho,
but afterwards I was taken into Kurilovka when I married. You see
my father did not want to divide the land among us. There were five
of us brothers. I took my leave and went to another village to live
with my wife's family, but my first wife died when she was young."
"What did she die of?"
"Of foolishness. She used to cry and cry and cry for no reason, and
so she pined away. She was always drinking some sort of herbs to
make her better looking, and I suppose she damaged her inside. And
my second wife is a Kurilovka woman too, there is nothing in her.
She's a village woman, a peasant woman, and nothing more. I was
taken in when they plighted me to her. I thought she was young and
fair-skinned, and that they lived in a clean way. Her mother was
just like a Flagellant and she drank coffee, and the chief thing,
to be sure, they were clean in their ways. So I married her, and
next day we sat down to dinner; I bade my mother-in-law give me a
spoon, and she gives me a spoon, and I see her wipe it out with her
finger. So much for you, thought I; nice sort of cleanliness yours
is. I lived a year with them and then I went away. I might have
married a girl from the town," he went on after a pause. "They say
a wife is a helpmate to her husband. What do I want with a helpmate?
I help myself; I'd rather she talked to me, and not clack, clack,
clack, but circumstantially, feelingly. What is life without good
conversation?"
Stepan suddenly paused, and at once there was the sound of his
dreary, monotonous "oo-loo-loo-loo." This meant that he had seen
me.
Masha used often to go to the mill, and evidently found pleasure
in her conversations with Stepan. Stepan abused the peasants with
such sincerity and conviction, and she was attracted to him. Every
time she came back from the mill the feeble-minded peasant, who
looked after the garden, shouted at her:
"Wench Palashka! Hulla, wench Palashka!" and he would bark like a
dog: "Ga! Ga!"
And she would stop and look at him attentively, as though in that
idiot's barking she found an answer to her thoughts, and probably
he attracted her in the same way as Stepan's abuse. At home some
piece of news would await her, such, for instance, as that the geese
from the village had ruined our cabbage in the garden, or that
Larion had stolen the reins; and shrugging her shoulders, she would
say with a laugh:
"What do you expect of these people?"
She was indignant, and there was rancour in her heart, and meanwhile
I was growing used to the peasants, and I felt more and more drawn
to them. For the most part they were nervous, irritable, downtrodden
people; they were people whose imagination had been stifled, ignorant,
with a poor, dingy outlook on life, whose thoughts were ever the
same--of the grey earth, of grey days, of black bread, people who
cheated, but like birds hiding nothing but their head behind the
tree--people who could not count. They would not come to mow for
us for twenty roubles, but they came for half a pail of vodka,
though for twenty roubles they could have bought four pails. There
really was filth and drunkenness and foolishness and deceit, but
with all that one yet felt that the life of the peasants rested on
a firm, sound foundation. However uncouth a wild animal the peasant
following the plough seemed, and however he might stupefy himself
with vodka, still, looking at him more closely, one felt that there
was in him what was needed, something very important, which was
lacking in Masha and in the doctor, for instance, and that was that
he believed the chief thing on earth was truth and justice, and
that his salvation, and that of the whole people, was only to be
found in truth and justice, and so more than anything in the world
he loved just dealing. I told my wife she saw the spots on the
glass, but not the glass itself; she said nothing in reply, or
hummed like Stepan "oo-loo-loo-loo." When this good-hearted and
clever woman turned pale with indignation, and with a quiver in her
voice spoke to the doctor of the drunkenness and dishonesty, it
perplexed me, and I was struck by the shortness of her memory. How
could she forget that her father the engineer drank too, and drank
heavily, and that the money with which Dubetchnya had been bought
had been acquired by a whole series of shameless, impudent dishonesties?
How could she forget it?