Doctor Blagovo came over on a bicycle. My sister began to come often.
Once more we talked of manual labour and progress, and the mysterious
Cross awaiting humanity in the remote future. The doctor did not like
our life, because it interfered with our discussions and he said it was
unworthy of a free man to plough, and reap, and breed cattle, and that
in time all such elementary forms of the struggle for existence would be
left to animals and machines, while men would devote themselves
exclusively to scientific investigation. And my sister always asked me
to let her go home earlier, and if she stayed late, or for the night,
she was greatly distressed.
"Good gracious, what a baby you are," Masha used to say reproachfully.
"It is quite ridiculous."
"Yes, it is absurd," my sister would agree. "I admit it is absurd, but
what can I do if I have not the power to control myself. It always seems
to me that I am doing wrong."
During the haymaking my body, not being used to it, ached all over;
sitting on the terrace in the evening, I would suddenly fall asleep and
they would all laugh at me. They would wake me up and make me sit down
to supper. I would be overcome with drowsiness and in a stupor saw
lights, faces, plates, and heard voices without understanding what they
were saying. And I used to get up early in the morning and take my
scythe, or go to the school and work there all day.
When I was at home on holidays I noticed that my wife and sister were
hiding something from me and even seemed to be avoiding me. My wife was
tender with me as always, but she had some new thought of her own which
she did not communicate to me. Certainly her exasperation with the
peasants had increased and life was growing harder and harder for her,
but she no longer complained to me. She talked more readily to the
doctor than to me, and I could not understand why.
It was the custom in our province for the labourers to come to the farm
in the evenings to be treated to vodka, even the girls having a glass.
We did not keep the custom; the haymakers and the women used to come
into the yard and stay until late in the evening, waiting for vodka, and
then they went away cursing. And then Masha used to frown and relapse
into silence or whisper irritably to the doctor:
"Savages! Barbarians!"
Newcomers to the villages were received ungraciously, almost with
hostility; like new arrivals at a school. At first we were looked upon
as foolish, soft-headed people who had bought the estate because we did
not know what to do with our money. We were laughed at. The peasants
grazed their cattle in our pasture and even in our garden, drove our
cows and horses into the village and then came and asked for
compensation. The whole village used to come into our yard and declare
loudly that in mowing we had cut the border of common land which did not
belong to us; and as we did not know our boundaries exactly we used to
take their word for it and pay a fine. But afterward it appeared that we
had been in the right. They used to bark the young lime-trees in our
woods. A Dubechnia peasant, a money-lender, who sold vodka without a
licence, bribed our labourers to help him cheat us in the most
treacherous way; he substituted old wheels for the new on our wagons,
stole our ploughing yokes and sold them back to us, and so on. But worst
of all was the building at Kurilovka. There the women at night stole
planks, bricks, tiles, iron; the bailiff and his assistants made a
search; the women were each fined two roubles by the village council,
and then the whole lot of them got drunk on the money.
When Masha found out, she would say to the doctor and my sister:
"What beasts! It is horrible! Horrible!"
And more than once I heard her say she was sorry she had decided to
build the school.
"You must understand," the doctor tried to point out, "that if you build
a school or undertake any good work, it is not for the peasants, but for
the sake of culture and the future. The worse the peasants are the more
reason there is for building a school. Do understand!"
There was a loss of confidence in his voice, and it seemed to me that he
hated the peasants as much as Masha.
Masha used often to go to the mill with my sister and they would say
jokingly that they were going to have a look at Stiepan because he was
so handsome. Stiepan it appeared was reserved and silent only with men,
and in the company of women was free and talkative. Once when I went
down to the river to bathe I involuntarily overheard a conversation.
Masha and Cleopatra, both in white, were sitting on the bank under the
broad shade of a willow and Stiepan was standing near with his hands
behind his back, saying:
"But are peasants human beings? Not they; they are, excuse me, brutes,
beasts, and thieves. What does a peasant's life consist of? Eating and
drinking, crying for cheaper food, bawling in taverns, without decent
conversation, or behaviour or manners. Just an ignorant beast! He lives
in filth, his wife and children live in filth; he sleeps in his clothes;
takes the potatoes out of the soup with his fingers, drinks down a black
beetle with his _kvass_--because he won't trouble to fish it out!"
"It is because of their poverty!" protested my sister.
"What poverty? Of course there is want, but there are different kinds of
necessity. If a man is in prison, or is blind, say, or has lost his
legs, then he is in a bad way and God help him; but if he is at liberty
and in command of his senses, if he has eyes and hands and strength,
then, good God, what more does he want? It is lamentable, my lady,
ignorance, but not poverty. If you kind people, with your education, out
of charity try to help him, then he will spend your money in drink, like
the swine he is, or worse still, he will open a tavern and begin to rob
the people on the strength of your money. You say--poverty. But does a
rich peasant live any better? He lives like a pig, too, excuse me, a
clodhopper, a blusterer, a big-bellied blockhead, with a swollen red
mug--makes me want to hit him in the eye, the blackguard. Look at Larion
of Dubechnia--he is rich, but all the same he barks the trees in your
woods just like the poor; and he is a foul-mouthed brute, and his
children are foul-mouthed, and when he is drunk he falls flat in the mud
and goes to sleep. They are all worthless, my lady. It is just hell to
live with them in the village. The village sticks in my gizzard, and I
thank God, the King of heaven, that I am well fed and clothed, and that
I am a free man; I can live where I like, I don't want to live in the
village and nobody can force me to do it. They say: 'You have a wife.'
They say: 'You are obliged to live at home with your wife.' Why? I have
not sold myself to her."
"Tell me, Stiepan. Did you marry for love?" asked Masha.
"What love is there in a village?" Stiepan answered with a smile. "If
you want to know, my lady, it is my second marriage. I do not come from
Kurilovka, but from Zalegosch, and I went to Kurilovka when I married.
My father did not want to divide the land up between us--there are five
of us. So I bowed to it and cut adrift and went to another village to my
wife's family. My first wife died when she was young."
"What did she die of?"
"Foolishness. She used to sit and cry. She was always crying for no
reason at all and so she wasted away. She used to drink herbs to make
herself prettier and it must have ruined her inside. And my second wife
at Kurilovka--what about her? A village woman, a peasant; that's all.
When the match was being made I was nicely had; I thought she was young,
nice to look at and clean. Her mother was clean enough, drank coffee
and, chiefly because they were a clean lot, I got married. Next day we
sat down to dinner and I told my mother-in-law to fetch me a spoon. She
brought me a spoon and I saw her wipe it with her finger. So that,
thought I, is their cleanliness! I lived with them for a year and went
away. Perhaps I ought to have married a town girl"--he went on after a
silence. "They say a wife is a helpmate to her husband. What do I want
with a helpmate? I can look after myself. But you talk to me sensibly
and soberly, without giggling all the while. He--he--he! What is life
without a good talk?"
Stiepan suddenly stopped and relapsed into his dreary, monotonous
"U-lu-lu-lu." That meant that he had noticed me.
Masha used often to visit the mill, she evidently took pleasure in her
talks with Stiepan; he abused the peasants so sincerely and
convincingly--and this attracted her to him. When she returned from the
mill the idiot who looked after the garden used to shout after her:
"Paloshka! Hullo, Paloshka!" And he would bark at her like a dog: "Bow,
wow!"
And she would stop and stare at him as if she found in the idiot's
barking an answer to her thought, and perhaps he attracted her as much
as Stiepan's abuse. And at home she would find some unpleasant news
awaiting her, as that the village geese had ruined the cabbages in the
kitchen-garden, or that Larion had stolen the reins, and she would shrug
her shoulders with a smile and say:
"What can you expect of such people?"
She was exasperated and a fury was gathering in her soul, and I, on the
other hand, was getting used to the peasants and more and more attracted
to them. For the most part, they were nervous, irritable, absurd people;
they were people with suppressed imaginations, ignorant, with a bare,
dull outlook, always dazed by the same thought of the grey earth, grey
days, black bread; they were people driven to cunning, but, like birds,
they only hid their heads behind the trees--they could not reason. They
did not come to us for the twenty roubles earned by haymaking, but for
the half-pail of vodka, though they could buy four pails of vodka for
the twenty roubles. Indeed they were dirty, drunken, and dishonest, but
for all that one felt that the peasant life as a whole was sound at the
core. However clumsy and brutal the peasant might look as he followed
his antiquated plough, and however he might fuddle himself with vodka,
still, looking at him more closely, one felt that there was something
vital and important in him, something that was lacking in Masha and the
doctor, for instance, namely, that he believes that the chief thing on
earth is truth, that his and everybody's salvation lies in truth, and
therefore above all else on earth he loves justice. I used to say to my
wife that she was seeing the stain on the window, but not the glass
itself; and she would be silent or, like Stiepan, she would hum,
"U-lu-lu-lu...." When she, good, clever actress that she was, went pale
with fury and then harangued the doctor in a trembling voice about
drunkenness and dishonesty; her blindness confounded and appalled me.
How could she forget that her father, the engineer, drank, drank
heavily, and that the money with which he bought Dubechnia was acquired
by means of a whole series of impudent, dishonest swindles? How could
she forget?