Elena Kirillovna enters the dining-room. She looks on as the table is
being laid for breakfast. She always notes the slightest disorder. She
grumbles quietly as she picks up something from one place on the table
and puts it in another.
Then she goes into the large, unused front room, with its closed door
on to the staircase of the front façade. She walks along the corridor
to the vestibule and to the back staircase. She stops on the high
landing, wrinkles up her face from the sun, and looks down to see what
is going on in the yard. Small, quite erect, like a young school-girl
with a yellow, wrinkled face which expresses at the moment a severe
domestic concern, she stands, looks on, and is silent; she is, it
seems, unnecessary here. No one pays her the slightest attention.
“Good morning, Stepanida,” she calls out. Stepanida, a buxom,
red-cheeked maid in a bright red dress, under which is visible a strip
of her white chemise and her stout sunburnt legs, is attending to the
samovar at the bottom of the stairs, and is vigorously blowing to set
the fire going. Upon her head is a neatly-arranged green kerchief,
which hides her folded braids of hair like a head-dress.
The bulging sides of the samovar glow radiantly in the sun. Its bent
chimney sends out a curl of blue smoke, which smells sharply,
pungently, and not altogether disagreeably, of juniper and tar.
In answer to the old mistress’s greeting Stepanida raises her broad,
cheerfully-preoccupied face, with its small, dark brown eyes, and says
in prolonged caressing tones, sing-song fashion:
“Good morning to you, _matushka barinya_.[3] It’s a fine morning, to be
sure. How warm it is, by the grace of God! And you’re up early,
_matushka barinya_!”
Her words are indeed honeyed, and above in the sweet air an early,
shaggy bee hovers, with a thick buzzing, tremulously golden in the
clear, fluid haze of the early, gentle sun. Silent again, Stepanida is
once more busy with the samovar; the disenchanted bee flies away, its
buzzing growing less and less audible behind the fence.
The pungent smell of tar causes Elena Kirillovna to frown. She says:
“What makes the thing smell so strongly? You had better leave it for a
while, or you will get giddy.”
Stepanida, without moving, answers languidly and indifferently:
“It’s nothing, _barinya_. We are used to it. It’s but a slight smell,
and it is the juniper.”
Through the blue, curling smoke of juniper her sweet voice seems dull
and bitter. There is a tickling at Elena Kirillovna’s throat. There is
a slight giddiness in her head. Elena Kirillovna makes haste to go. She
descends the staircase, and proceeds upon her customary morning stroll.
[3] Literally: “Little mother—gentlewoman.”