The long, snowy winter set in.
The plain, gleaming palely white beneath a bluish lowering sky,
appeared broader, more spacious, and even more deserted than ever.
The cottages, sheds, bushes, grain-ricks stood out sharply against
the new-fallen snow. Then the blizzards began and swept the country,
burying it under so much snow that the village assumed a bleak northern
aspect and began to show as its black points only the doors and tiny
windows, which hardly peeped out from beneath white snow caps pulled
well down, from amid the white masses of the earthen banks around the
houses. Following the blizzards, across the concealed grey surface of
the frozen crust on the fields swept cruel winds which tore away the
last remaining light-brown foliage from the unsheltered oak scrub in
the ravines. And then the one-farm owner, Taras Milyaeff, who resembled
a native Siberian and was as keen on hunting as a real Siberian, set
forth, plunging deep into the impenetrable snowdrifts, all dotted
with the footprints of hares, and the water barrels were converted
into frozen blocks, and slippery ice-coated hillocks formed around
the water-holes; the roads wound among snowdrifts--and the ordinary
winter conditions reigned. Epidemic diseases broke out in the villages:
smallpox, typhus, scarlet fever, croup. But those maladies had existed
uninterruptedly in the countryside since time immemorial, during the
winter season, and people had become so used to them that they made no
more mention of them than they did of changes in the weather. Around
the holes cut in the ice, at which all Durnovka drank, over the fetid
dark bottle-green water, the peasant women stood for days at a time,
bent low, with their petticoats tucked up higher than their bare blue
knees: they were in wet bast-slippers, and their heads were hugely
muffled. Out of their iron kettles of ashes they dragged their own grey
hempen chemises, patched to the waist with calico; their husbands’
heavy breeches; their children’s soiled swaddling-cloths--rinsed them
out, beat them with clothes-mallets, and screamed at one another,
imparting the information that their hands were “numbed from the
steam,” that at Makaroff’s homestead his wife was dying of the typhus,
that Yakoff’s daughter-in-law had got her throat stopped up. The
little girls capered out of the cottages, straight from the stoves,
with nothing on but their tiny chemises, and round the corner on the
mounds of hardened snow. The little boys, dressed in their fathers’
old clothes, slid down the hills on their rude sleds, flew head over
heels, screeched, were racked with terrible coughs, and returned home
at evening in a state of fever, with heavy, bewildered heads. They were
so chilled that they could barely move their lips as they begged for
a drink, and, after drinking, they crept tearfully upon the oven. But
even the mothers paid no attention to those who were ill. And darkness
settled down at three o’clock, and the shaggy dogs sat on the roofs,
almost on a level with the snowdrifts. Not a soul knew on what food
those dogs existed. Nevertheless they were lively, even ferocious.
People woke early in the manor-house. At daybreak in the blue darkness,
when the lights began to twinkle from the cottages, they made the fires
in the stoves, and through the crevices under the eaves slowly poured
the thick milky smoke. In the wing, with its frozen grey window, it
became as cold as in the vestibule. Kuzma was awakened by the banging
of doors and the rustling of frozen, snow-coated straw which Koshel
was dragging from the truck-sledge. His low, hoarse voice became
audible--the voice of a man who had risen earlier than any one else,
working on an empty stomach, and chilled through. The pipe of the
samovar began to rattle, and the Bride conversed with Koshel in a stern
whisper. She did not sleep in the servants’ quarters, where the roaches
bit arms and legs until they drew blood, but in the ante-room--and the
whole village was convinced that there was a good reason for this. The
village knew well what the Bride had undergone in the autumn: how she
had been overwhelmed with disgrace--Rodka’s death--how her mother had
gone away on a begging expedition, having locked up the empty cottage.
Silent, crushed by the burden of her sorrow, the Bride was more severe
and mournful than a cloistered nun. But what cared the village for
other people’s woes? Kuzma had already heard, from Odnodvorka, what was
being said in the village, and, as he woke, he always recalled it with
shame and disgust. He pounded on the wall with his fist and, clearing
his throat, began to smoke a cigarette: this quieted his heart and
relieved his chest. He slept under his sheepskin coat, and, loath to
part with the warmth, he continued to smoke, and said to himself: “A
shameless people! Why, I have a daughter almost as old as she is....”
The fact that a young woman slept on the other side of the partition
wall excited only paternal tenderness in him. By day she was taciturn
and serious, niggardly of words, shy with the modesty of a young
maiden. And when she was asleep, there was even something childlike,
sad, and lonely about her. One day she fell asleep after dinner on her
chest in the ante-room, her head wrapped in a hempen shawl, her legs
drawn up and one knee revealed. Her feet, in their bark shoes, lay in
womanly wise, and the chilled knee gleamed white like that of a little
girl. And Kuzma, as he passed her, turned away and called to her, so
that she woke up and covered it. But would the village believe that?
Even Tikhon Ilitch did not believe it: he laughed in a very peculiar
way, at times. Indeed, he always had been distrustful, suspicious,
coarse in his suspicions; and now he had completely lost his head. Say
what you would to him, he had one answer for everything.
“Have you heard, Tikhon Ilitch? They say that Zakrzhevsky is dying of
catarrh: they have taken him to Orel.”
“Stuff and nonsense. We know what that catarrh really is!”
“But the medical man told me.”
“Believe him if it suits you--”
“I want to subscribe to a newspaper,” you would say to him. “Please let
me have ten rubles of my wages on account.”
“Hm! Why does a man want to stuff his head with lies? Well, and to tell
the truth, I haven’t more than fifteen or twenty kopeks in my pocket--”
The Bride would enter the room, with downcast eyes: “We have hardly any
flour on hand, Tikhon Ilitch--”
“How comes that? Hardly any? Oï, you’re talking nonsense, woman!” And
he would contract his brows in a frown. And while he was proving that
the flour ought to last for another three days, at least, he kept
darting swift glances now at Kuzma, now at the Bride. Once he even
inquired, with a grin: “And how do you sleep--all right? are you warm?”
And the Bride, who was embarrassed already by his visits, blushed
deeply and, bowing her head, left the room, while Kuzma’s fingers
turned cold with shame and wrath.
“Shame on you, brother Tikhon Ilitch,” he blurted out, turning away to
the window. “And especially after what you told me yourself--”
“But then why did she blush?” inquired Tikhon Ilitch maliciously, with
a perturbed and awkward smile.