The most unpleasant thing in the morning was--washing oneself. A frosty
atmosphere was brought into the ante-room with the straw; ice that was
like broken glass floated in the wash-basin. Kuzma sometimes began to
drink his tea after having washed only his hands and, thus fresh from
his slumbers, appeared truly an old man. Thanks to lack of cleanliness
and the cold, he had grown extremely thin and grey since the autumn.
His hands had grown thinner, and the skin on them had become more
delicate, shiny, and covered with certain tiny purplish spots.
“The old grey horse has gone down a steep hill,” he said to himself.
It was a grey morning. Beneath the crusted grey snow the village also
had become quite grey in hue by St. Philip’s Day. The frozen household
linen hung like grey boards from the rafters under the roofs of the
sheds. Everything round about the cottages was frozen--they poured out
the slops and threw out the ashes. Tattered little urchins hurried
through the streets between the cottages and sheds to school, ran up
the snowdrifts and slid down them on their bark slippers; all of them
had heavy crash bags containing slates and bread. From the opposite
direction came aged, ailing dark-faced Tohugunok,[34] with not a trace
of his former agility remaining, clad in his thin little overcoat, and
bowed beneath the weight of his yoke, from which hung two buckets;
stumbling along in his hideous felt boots, which had turned stiff as
oaken boards, and were bound with pigskin. From drift to drift a horse
dragged the water-cask, plugged with straw, rocking and splashing as
it went; and behind it ran white-eyed Kobylyai--the stammerer. Women
passed, on their way to borrow from one another salt, millet, a scoop
of flour for griddlecakes, or a hasty pudding. The threshing-floors
were deserted. Only at Yakoff’s place was smoke issuing from the gate
of the kiln: in imitation of the rich peasants, he threshed during
the winter. And beyond the threshing-floors, beyond the bare bushes
in the back yards, beneath a low-hanging whitish sky, stretched the
grey snow-covered plain, a waste of snow-crust frozen in the semblance
of waves. It was in truth more cosy in the village, but the place
seemed infected with the plague: almost every household had a case of
smallpox or spotted typhus.
Occasionally Kuzma went to eat luncheon with Koshel in the servants’
quarters--potatoes as hot as fire itself, or the remains of the sour
cabbage soup left over from the previous day. He recalled the town
where he had lived all his life, and was amazed to find that he had no
longing whatsoever to go back there. The town was Tikhon’s cherished
dream; he scorned and hated the country with all his soul. Kuzma only
tried to hate it. He now reviewed his existence with more terror than
ever. He had grown thoroughly wild and unsociable in Durnovka; he did
nothing, was bored, was distressed by his own idleness; frequently he
omitted to wash himself; he did not take off his undercoat; he ate
greedily out of one bowl with Koshel. But the worst of it all was
that, while alarmed at his mode of existence, which was aging him not
merely from day to day but actually from hour to hour, he was conscious
that it was nevertheless agreeable to him; that he seemed to have got
back into precisely that rut which, possibly, had rightly belonged
to him from the day of his birth. Not for nothing, apparently, did
the Durnovka blood flow in his veins! Nevertheless, that interminable
Durnovka winter oppressed him to the point of pain--those cottages,
the holes in the ice of the pond, the horrid little boys, the dogs on
the roofs, the cold, the dirt, the sickness, the animal-like laziness
of the peasant men. Nearly every day he called to mind Menshoff, Akim,
Syery....
After luncheon he sometimes took a stroll over the manor-farm or in the
village. He went also to Yakoff’s threshing-floor, or dropped in at
the cottage of Syery or that of Koshel, whose old woman lived alone,
was reputed to be a witch, was tall and frightfully emaciated, and had
teeth as intrusively conspicuous as those of a skull. She spoke roughly
and decisively, like a man, and smoked a pipe: she would make a fire
in the stove, seat herself on the sleeping-board, and set to smoking,
all by herself, swinging back and forth as she did so her long, thin
leg in its heavy black bark shoe. During the entire Fast Kuzma went
away from the farm only twice--once to the post-office, and once to
see his brother. And those little trips were pleasant, but painful;
Kuzma got so thoroughly chilled that he could not feel whether he had
any feet or not. At the beginning of the autumn he had still possessed
a firm glance, a tidy appearance. But the firmness of the glance had
vanished, and his clothing had grown dilapidated. The collar of his
shirt was reduced to a fringe, and the elbows of his coat wore through;
his calfskin boots had become fairly red with rust, thin, and, in
places, gaping. His sheepskin coat had served him so long that it was
dotted all over with bald spots. And the wind on the plain was savage.
After sitting in the house so long at Durnovka he was not able to
endure the strong, fresh winter air. After prolonged inspection of the
village the snowy grey expanse came as a surprise; the far distance,
enveloped in blue tints of winter, seemed as a picture so beautiful
that one could never gaze one’s fill. The horse dashed along smartly
in the face of the harsh wind, snorting as he went; frozen lumps of
snow flew from beneath his shod hoofs against the dashboard of the
sledge. Koshel, with a blackish-purple frost-bitten cheek, briskly
clearing his throat, sprang from the box at the slopes and leaped back
into the sledge sidewise, on the run. But the wind pierced straight
through him; his feet, tucked into straw that was all mixed with snow,
ached and stiffened; his forehead and cheek-bones were racked with
rheumatic pains. And it was so boresome in the low-ceiled post-office
at Ulianovka--boresome as it can be only in official offices in the
wilds. There was an odour of mildew, of sealing-wax. The ragged postman
was pounding with his stamp. Grumpy Sakharoff, who resembled a gorilla,
was roaring at the peasants, raging because it had not occurred to
Kuzma to send him half a dozen fowls or, at least, a pud of flour; and
he inquired: “What’s your name, and your family name?”--and, after
rummaging in the closet, he announced with decision: “Nothing for you.”
In the vicinity of Tikhon Ilitch’s house Kuzma was upset by the stench
of manure fumes, which reminded him that in the world exist towns,
people, newspapers, news. It was agreeable, also, to chat with his
brother, to rest at his house and get warm.
But the chat never was a success. His brother was called off every
minute to the shop, or about some detail of domestic management, and,
besides, he could talk of nothing but his property matters, the lies,
craftiness, and malice of the peasants--about the sheer necessity of
getting rid of the estate as speedily as possible. Nastasya Petrovna
was pitiable. Evidently she had come to fear her husband most terribly;
she burst into the conversation at unseasonable moments, at equally
unseasonable moments she praised him--his intelligence, his keen
managerial eye, the fact that he entered into everything, every minute
detail of the business, himself.
“And he’s so accessible to every one, so approachable!” she said--and
Tikhon Ilitch roughly cut her short, while Kuzma did not know what to
say, fearing to get mixed up in a quarrel. They had exchanged roles:
now it was not he who suggested alarm, but his brother who frightened
and exhorted him; it was not he but his brother who demonstrated that
it was impossible to live in Russia. After an hour of that sort of
conversation, Kuzma began to long to get home, to get back to the
manor. “What is to become of me?” he thought in alarm, as he listened
to his brother discussing the sale of the estate. And was it possible
that that dreadful marriage between Deniska and the Bride would come
off? And why did Tikhon so obstinately insist that the marriage must
take place? “He has gone mad, he certainly has gone mad!” muttered
Kuzma on his way home, as he called to mind Tikhon’s surly and
malevolent face, his uncommunicativeness, his suspiciousness, and his
wearisome repetition of one and the same thing over and over. He began
to shout at Koshel, at the horse, feeling in a hurry to hide in his
little house his sadness, his old, cold clothing, his loneliness, and
his tenderness at the thought of the Bride’s sweet, sorrowful face,
her womanliness and--her taciturnity. “Ekh, and how could she fail to
go to ruin here!” he said sadly to himself, as he gazed through the
twilight gloom at the meagre lights in Durnovka.