Opposite the house, with their rear to Durnovka, to the wide ravine,
stood the storehouses. From the porch, half of the village was visible,
and beyond the storehouses the pond and a part of the promontory--one
windmill and the schoolhouse. The sun rose to the left, beyond the
fields, beyond the railway line on the horizon. In the morning the pond
glittered with a bright, fresh exhalation, and from the park behind the
house was wafted an odour of foliage from evergreens and leaf trees,
steppe grass, apples, and dew. The rooms were small and empty. In the
study, papered with old music sheets, rye was stored; in the hall and
the drawing-room no furniture was left save a few Viennese chairs
with broken seats and a large extension table. The windows of the
drawing-room overlooked the park, and during almost the entire autumn
Kuzma passed the night in it, on a broken-down couch, without closing
the windows. The floor was never swept: the widow Odnodvorka lived
there temporarily, in the capacity of cook; she had been the mistress
of young Durnovo, and was obliged to run after her small children and
prepare food, after a fashion, for herself, Kuzma, and the labourer.
Kuzma himself prepared the samovar in the morning, after which he sat
at the window in the hall and drank tea and ate apples.
Through the early glitter, beyond the brilliant mist over the ploughed
fields, the railway train dashed past in the morning; and, above,
rose-coloured wreaths floated behind it. Dense smoke hung over the
roofs of the village. The garden was freshly fragrant; silvery
hoar-frost lay upon the storehouses. At noon the sun stood over the
village; it was hot out of doors; in the park the maples and lindens
grew thin, quietly dropping their leaves; the vast spaces and the
transparent dry air of the fields were filled with silence and with
peace. The doves, warmed up by the sun, dozed all day long on the
sloping roof of the kitchen, whose new straw roof gleamed yellow
against the clear blue sky. The labourer rested after his dinner.
Odnodvorka went off to her own home.
But Kuzma roamed about. He went to the threshing-floor, rejoicing in
the sun, the firm road, the withered steppe grass, the beet-tops which
had turned dark brown, the charming late flower of the blue chicory,
and the down of the cotton thistle floating quietly through the air.
The ploughed spaces in the fields gleamed in the sunlight with the
silken threads of barely visible spiders’ webs, which extended to an
immense distance. In the vegetable garden, goldfinches perched on the
dry stalks of the burdocks. Upon the threshing-floor, amid the profound
stillness in the sultry heat, grasshoppers diligently emitted their
hoarse cry.
From the threshing-floor Kuzma climbed across the earthen well and
returned to the manor-house through the orchard and the fir plantation.
In the orchard he chatted with the petty burghers, the lessees of
the orchard, with the Bride and the Goat, who were gathering up the
windfalls, and forced his way, in their company, into the nettle
patch where lay the ripest fruit of all. Sometimes he wandered to the
village, to the schoolhouse. He became freshened up, sunburned; he felt
himself almost happy.
The Goat amazed him by her health, her cheery stupidity, her
senselessly brilliant Egyptian eyes. The Bride was handsome and
strange. With him, as with Tikhon, she remained silent; not a word was
to be got out of her. But when one went away she gave vent to a harsh
laugh, indulged in bawling conversations with the petty burghers, and
would suddenly strike up:
“Let them thrash me, curse me--
My pretty eyes will twinkle more ...”
The soldier-teacher, born stupid, had lost in the service what small
wits he had ever possessed. In appearance he was the most commonplace
sort of peasant, about forty years of age. But he always spoke in such
an extraordinary manner, and uttered such nonsense, that all one could
do was to throw up one’s hands in despair. He was for ever smiling with
the greatest appearance of slyness at something or other; he looked
down upon his interlocutor condescendingly, with his eyes screwed up,
and never replied to any question immediately.
“How am I to address you?” Kuzma asked him the first time he visited
the school.
The soldier blinked and considered the matter. “The sheep without a
name might be a ram,” he said at last, at his leisure. “But I will ask
you something also. Is Adam a name, or is it not?”
“It is.”
“Very well. And about how many people, for example, have died since
then?”
“I don’t know,” said Kuzma. “Why do you inquire?”
“Simply because that’s one of the things we never were born to
understand. Now, take any busybody you like. Do you indulge in revolt?
Do it, my dear man: perhaps you will become a _fit_-marshal! Only,
at best, that they may stretch you out without your breeches for a
flogging. Are you a peasant? Till the soil. Are you a cooper? In that
case, equally, attend to your business. I, for example, am a soldier
and a veterinary. Not long ago I was passing through the Fair, and
what should I see but a horse with the glanders? I went at once to the
policeman: ‘Thus and so,’ says I, ‘Your High Well-born.’ ‘But can you
kill that horse with a feather?’ ‘With the greatest pleasure!’”
“With what sort of a feather?” inquired Kuzma.
“Why, a goose feather. I took it, sharpened it, jabbed it into his
spinal cord, blew a little--into the feather, I mean--and the thing was
done. ’Tis a simple matter, to all appearance, but just try to do it!”
And the soldier winked craftily and tapped his brow with his finger:
“Understanding is needed here.”
Kuzma shrugged his shoulders and made no reply. And as he passed
Odnodvorka’s cottage he found out from her boy Senka what the soldier’s
name was. It turned out to be Parmen.
“And what’s your task for to-morrow?” added Kuzma, gazing with
curiosity at Senka’s fiery red mop of hair, his lively green eyes, his
pock-marked face, his rickety little body, and his hands and feet all
cracked with mud and chaps.
“The tasks are verses,” said Senka, grasping his uplifted foot in his
right hand and hopping up and down on one spot.
“What sort of tasks?”
“Counting the geese. A flock of geese has flown past--”
“Ah, I know,” said Kuzma. “And what else?”
“Also mice--”
“They are to be counted too?”
“Yes. Six mice were walking along carrying six copper coins,” mumbled
Senka rapidly, casting a sidelong glance at Kuzma’s silver watch chain.
“One mouse, which was bigger, carried two coins. How many does that
make in all--?”
“Splendid. And what are the verses?”
Senka released his foot.
“The verses are ‘Who is he?’”
“Have you learned them?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Well, then, say them.”
And Senka muttered still more rapidly about a horseman who was riding
above the Neva through the forests, where there were only--
“‘Firs, pine-trees, and green moss....’”
“Grey,” said Kuzma, “not green.”
“Well, then, grey,” assented Senka.
“And who was that horseman?”
Senka considered the matter. “Why, a sorcerer,” said he.
“Exactly. Now, tell your mother that she ought to cut your hair, on
your temples at least. ’Tis all the worse for you as it is, when the
teacher pulls it.”
“Then he’ll find my ears,” said Senka unconcernedly, again grasping his
foot, and off he hopped on the pasture common.