He alighted at the fourth station and hired a conveyance. At first
the peasant drivers demanded seven rubles--it was twelve versts to
Kazakovo--then they came down to five and a half. At last one of them
said: “Give me a three-ruble note and I’ll drive you; otherwise, ’tis
not worth wagging your tongue about. Times nowadays are not what they
used to be.” But he was unable to maintain that tone, and added the
customary phrase: “And, besides, fodder is dear.” And he drove, after
all, for a ruble and a half. The mud was fathomless, impassable, the
cart was tiny, the wretched little nag, barely alive, was as long-eared
as an ass and extremely weak. When they had slowly emerged from the
courtyard of the station, the peasant, seated on the side-rail, began
to get impatient and jerked the rope reins as if he longed with his
whole being to aid the horse. At the station he had bragged “She can’t
be held back,” and now he evidently felt ashamed. But the worst part of
it all was--the man himself. Young, huge of build, fairly plump, he was
clad in bast-shoes and white leg-wrappers, a short kazak coat girt with
a strip of cloth, and an old peaked cap on his straight yellow hair. He
emitted the smoky odour out of a chimneyless hut and of hemp--a regular
husbandman of olden times, with a white beardless face, a swollen
throat and a hoarse voice.
“What’s your name?” inquired Kuzma.
“I’m called Akhvanasiy.”
“Akhvanasiy!” said Kuzma angrily to himself. “And what else?”
“Menshoff.--Ho, get up there, antichrist!”
“Is it the evil malady?” And Kuzma indicated his throat with a nod.
“Well, yes, it is,” mumbled Menshoff, turning his eyes aside. “I’ve
been drinking cold kvas.”
“Does it hurt you to swallow?”
“To swallow?--no, it doesn’t hurt--”
“Well, anyway, don’t talk unnecessarily,” said Kuzma sternly. “You’d
better go to the hospital as soon as you can. Married, I suppose?”
“Yes, I’m married....”
“Well, there, now, you see. You’ll have children, and you’ll be making
them all a famous present!”
“Just as sure as giving them a drink,” assented Menshoff. And, waxing
impatient, he began to jerk the reins again. “Ho, get up there. You’re
an unmanageable brute, antichrist!” At last he abandoned this futile
effort and calmed down. For a long time he maintained silence, then
suddenly inquired: “Have they assembled that Duma yet, merchant?”
“Yes.”
“And they do say that Makaroff is still alive, only they don’t want it
known.”
Kuzma merely shrugged his shoulders: the devil only knew what these
steppe men had in their heads! “But what wealth is here!” he said to
himself, as he sat miserably on a tuft of straw, his knees drawn up on
the bare floor of the springless cart, covered with a coarse cloth used
for wrapping grain. He surveyed the road. The weather had grown still
colder; still more gloomily the storm-clouds from the northwest came
sailing over this black loam region, saturated with rains. The mud on
the roads was bluish, greasy; the green of the trees, of the grass, of
the vegetable gardens was dark and dense; and over everything lay that
bluish tint of the black loam and the storm-clouds. But the cottages
were of clay, tiny, with roofs of manure. Alongside them stood dried-up
water casks. Of course, the water in them contained tadpoles.
Here was a well-to-do farmstead. In the vegetable garden, behind
old bushes, an apiary, and a tiny orchard of three or four wild
apple-trees, rose an old, dark-hued grain rick. The stable, the
gate, and the cottage were all under one roof, thatched with hackled
straw. The cottage was of brick, in two sections, the dividing line
marked out with chalk: on one side was a pole surmounted by a forked
branch, a fir-tree; on the other was something resembling a cock.
The small windows were also rimmed with chalk in a toothed pattern.
“There’s creative genius for you!” grinned Kuzma. “The stone age, God
forgive me--the times of the cave men!” On the doors of the detached
sheds were crosses sketched in charcoal; by the porch stood a large
tombstone, obviously prepared in anticipation of death by grandfather
or grandmother. Yes, truly, a well-to-do farmstead. But the mud round
about was knee deep; a pig was reclining on the porch, and on top
of him, balancing itself and flapping its wings, a yellow chicken
was parading. The windows were tiny, and in the part of the cottage
appropriated to human occupation, darkness and eternally cramped
conditions must inevitably reign--the sleeping shelf on top of the
oven, the loom for weaving, a good-sized oven, a trough filled with
slops. And the family would be large, with many children, and in winter
time there would be lambs and calves as well. And the dampness and the
charcoal fumes would be such that a green vapour must hang over all.
The children would whimper and howl when slapped on the nape of the
neck; the sisters-in-law would revile one another (“May the lightning
smite you, you roving, homeless cur!”) and each express the hope that
the other might “choke on a bite on the Great Day”;[28] the aged
mother-in-law would be incessantly hurling something--the oven-fork,
the bowls--and rushing at her daughters-in-law, her sleeves tucked up
on her dark, sinewy arms, and wearing herself out with shrill scolding,
besprinkling now one of them, now another with saliva and curses. The
old man, ugly-tempered and ailing, would wear them all to exhaustion
with his exhortations, would drag his married sons by the hair; and
sometimes they would weep, in the repulsive peasant way.
“Whose farm is this?” asked Kuzma. “The Krasnoffs’,” answered Menshoff,
adding, “All of them are sick with it, too.”
Beyond the Krasnoff farm they drove out on to the pasturage. The
village was large, and so was the common for pasture. The annual
Fair was being arranged on it. The framework of booths already rose
aloft here and there, and there were piles of wheels and pottery; a
hastily constructed oven was smoking, and a smell of fritters hung in
the air; the travelling caravan-wagon of some gypsies loomed grey on
the plain, and close to its wheels sat sheep-dogs, fastened to them by
chains. On the left, peasant cottages were visible; on the right lay
a lumber-yard, two town shops, and a bakery. Farther away, alongside
the governmental dram-shop, stood a dense cluster of young girls and
peasant men, from which shouts rang out.
“The people are making holiday,” remarked Menshoff thoughtfully.
“What’s the cause of their joy?” inquired Kuzma.
“They are hoping for--”
“For what?”
“Everybody knows for what. The house-sprite!”
And it was true. On that bare pasture-common, that overcast, chilly
day, those squeals of delight and the sounds of two accordions played
in perfect unison seemed pitiful, were swallowed in an atmosphere of
commonplaceness, of boredom and age. The people were experiencing
something new, were celebrating something, but did they believe in
their festival? “Oh, hardly!” said Kuzma to himself, as he drove close
and surveyed the white, pink, and green petticoats of the girls, the
indifferent, coarsely painted faces, the orange-coloured, golden-hued,
and crimson kerchiefs. The cart drove up to the crowd and halted.
Menshoff stared boldly at the throng and broke into a grin. At that
close range the sounds no longer seemed pitiful--the accordions eagerly
played up to each other, and in harmony with them, amid the approving
hubbub of the drunken men, quaint adages flew briskly about.
“Ho-o,” some one shouted, to an accompaniment of dull but lusty
stamping of feet:
“Plough not, reap not,
But bring fritters to the maidens!”
And a peasant, short of stature, who was standing behind the crowd,
suddenly began to flourish his arms. Everything about him was
prosperous, clean, substantial--his bast-shoes, his leg-wrappers, his
new trousers of heavy plaided home-made linen, and the pleated skirts
of his undercoat, made of appallingly thick grey cloth and cut very
short, with a bob-tailed effect. It is probable that he had never
danced before in his life, but now he began, softly and skilfully, to
stamp with his bast-shoes, to wave his arms, and to shout in a tenor
voice: “Stand aside, let the merchant have a peep!” and, leaping into
the circle, which parted before him, he began to kick his legs about
wildly in front of a tall young fellow, who, tossing away his peaked
cap, twisted his boots about in devilish fashion and, as he did so,
flung aside his black jacket and danced on in his new cotton print
shirt. The face of the young man was pale and perspiring and wore a
concentrated, gloomy expression which made his piercing yells seem all
the more violent and unexpected.
“Son! Dear one!” shrieked an old crone in a plaided wool skirt of South
Russian fashion, stretching out her hands. “Stop, for Christ’s sake!
Dear boy, stop it--you’ll kill yourself!”
And her dear son suddenly threw back his head, clenched his fists
and his teeth, and, with fury in his countenance and his trampling,
screeched through his teeth:
“Tztzytz, good woman, shut your mouth with that cuckoo song.”
“And she has just sold the last bit of her home-made linen for him,”
remarked Menshoff, as they crawled slowly across the pasture land. “She
loves him passionately. She’s a widow. He raps her over the mouth when
he is drunk. Of course, she deserves it.”
“What do you mean by that--‘she deserves it.’?” inquired Kuzma.
“Because she does. You shouldn’t be too indulgent--”
Yes, in the town, in the railway carriages, in the hamlets, in the
villages, everywhere, one could feel the presence of something
unusual, the echoes of some great festival, some great victory, great
expectations. But back there in the suburb Kuzma had already realized
that the farther one went into those limitless fields, beneath that
cold, gloomy sky, the duller, the more irrational, the more melancholy
would those echoes become. Now they had driven away, and the shouts
in the crowd about the dram-shop had again become pitiful. There
they were keeping festival and trying to “celebrate,” but ahead lay
boredom, remote wilds, an empty street, smoky chimneyless hovels,
water-casks with putrid pond water, and then more fields, the blue mist
of the chilly distance, the dark forest on the horizon, low-hanging
storm-clouds.
At one cottage--it had a broken window and a wheel on the rotten
roof--a long-legged, ailing peasant sat on a bench. People look
handsomer in their coffins than he looked in life. He resembled the
poet Nekrasoff. Over his shoulders, above a long and soiled shirt of
hemp crash, was thrown an old short sheepskin coat; his stick-like legs
stood in felt boots; his huge dead-looking hands lay evenly spaced on
his sharp knees, upon his ragged trousers. His cap was pulled far down
on his forehead, after the fashion of old men; his eyes were suffering,
entreating; his superhumanly meagre and emaciated face was drawn down,
his ashen lips half open.
“That’s Tchutchen,”[29] said Menshoff, nodding in the direction of
the sick man. “He’s been dying these two years from trouble with his
stomach.”
“Tchutchen? What’s that--a nickname?”
“Yes, a nickname.”
“Stupid!” said Kuzma. And he turned his head away, in order to avoid
seeing the horrid little girl by the neighbouring cottage. She was
leaning back and holding in her arms an infant in a cap, and, as she
stared intently at the passers-by and stuck out her tongue at them,
she chewed on a bit of black bread, which she was preparing as a
sucking-piece for the child. And in the last yard and threshing-floor
the bushes hummed in the breezes, and a scarecrow, all awry, fluttered
its empty sleeves. The threshing-floor, which adjoins the steppe,
is always uncomfortable, dreary; and there were the scarecrow, the
autumnal storm-clouds, the wind humming across the fields, ruffling up
the tails of the fowls which roved about the threshing-floor, overgrown
with pigweed and mugwort, alongside the grain-rick with its uncovered
crest, alongside the threshing machine of Ryazan make, painted blue....