easy tone, "and I wish you all happiness. Ekaterina Andreyevna sends her
congratulations and begs you to excuse her. She is not very well."
"How unkind of her! I have been expecting her all day. Is it long since
you left Petersburg?" Olga Mihalovna asked the student. "What kind of
weather have you there now?" And without waiting for an answer, she
looked cordially at the schoolboys and repeated:
"How tall they have grown! It is not long since they used to come with
their nurse, and they are at school already! The old grow older while
the young grow up. . . . Have you had dinner?"
"Oh, please don't trouble!" said the student.
"Why, you have not had dinner?"
"For goodness' sake, don't trouble!"
"But I suppose you are hungry?" Olga Mihalovna said it in a harsh, rude
voice, with impatience and vexation--it escaped her unawares, but at once
she coughed, smiled, and flushed crimson. "How tall they have grown!"
she said softly.
"Please don't trouble!" the student said once more.
The student begged her not to trouble; the boys said nothing; obviously
all three of them were hungry. Olga Mihalovna took them into the dining-
room and told Vassily to lay the table.
"How unkind of your mamma!" she said as she made them sit down. "She has
quite forgotten me. Unkind, unkind, unkind . . . you must tell her so.
What are you studying?" she asked the student.
"Medicine."
"Well, I have a weakness for doctors, only fancy. I am very sorry my
husband is not a doctor. What courage any one must have to perform an
operation or dissect a corpse, for instance! Horrible! Aren't you
frightened? I believe I should die of terror! Of course, you drink
vodka?"
"Please don't trouble."
"After your journey you must have something to drink. Though I am a
woman, even I drink sometimes. And Mitya and Kolya will drink Malaga.
It's not a strong wine; you need not be afraid of it. What fine fellows
they are, really! They'll be thinking of getting married next."
Olga Mihalovna talked without ceasing; she knew by experience that when
she had guests to entertain it was far easier and more comfortable to
talk than to listen. When you talk there is no need to strain your
attention to think of answers to questions, and to change your
expression of face. But unawares she asked the student a serious
question; the student began a lengthy speech and she was forced to
listen. The student knew that she had once been at the University, and
so tried to seem a serious person as he talked to her.
"What subject are you studying?" she asked, forgetting that she had
already put that question to him.
"Medicine."
Olga Mihalovna now remembered that she had been away from the ladies for
a long while.
"Yes? Then I suppose you are going to be a doctor?" she said, getting
up. "That's splendid. I am sorry I did not go in for medicine myself. So
you will finish your dinner here, gentlemen, and then come into the
garden. I will introduce you to the young ladies."
She went out and glanced at her watch: it was five minutes to six. And
she wondered that the time had gone so slowly, and thought with horror
that there were six more hours before midnight, when the party would
break up. How could she get through those six hours? What phrases could
she utter? How should she behave to her husband?
There was not a soul in the drawing-room or on the verandah. All the
guests were sauntering about the garden.
"I shall have to suggest a walk in the birchwood before tea, or else a
row in the boats," thought Olga Mihalovna, hurrying to the croquet
ground, from which came the sounds of voices and laughter.
"And sit the old people down to vint. . . ." She met Grigory the footman
coming from the croquet ground with empty bottles.
"Where are the ladies?" she asked.
"Among the raspberry-bushes. The master's there, too."
"Oh, good heavens!" some one on the croquet lawn shouted with
exasperation. "I have told you a thousand times over! To know the
Bulgarians you must see them! You can't judge from the papers!"
Either because of the outburst or for some other reason, Olga Mihalovna
was suddenly aware of a terrible weakness all over, especially in her
legs and in her shoulders. She felt she could not bear to speak, to
listen, or to move.
"Grigory," she said faintly and with an effort, "when you have to serve
tea or anything, please don't appeal to me, don't ask me anything, don't
speak of anything. . . . Do it all yourself, and . . . and don't make a
noise with your feet, I entreat you. . . . I can't, because . . ."
Without finishing, she walked on towards the croquet lawn, but on the
way she thought of the ladies, and turned towards the raspberry-bushes.
The sky, the air, and the trees looked gloomy again and threatened rain;
it was hot and stifling. An immense flock of crows, foreseeing a storm,
flew cawing over the garden. The paths were more overgrown, darker, and
narrower as they got nearer the kitchen garden. In one of them, buried
in a thick tangle of wild pear, crab-apple, sorrel, young oaks, and
hopbine, clouds of tiny black flies swarmed round Olga Mihalovna. She
covered her face with her hands and began forcing herself to think of
the little creature . . . . There floated through her imagination the
figures of Grigory, Mitya, Kolya, the faces of the peasants who had come
in the morning to present their congratulations.
She heard footsteps, and she opened her eyes. Uncle Nikolay Nikolaitch
was coming rapidly towards her.
"It's you, dear? I am very glad . . ." he began, breathless. "A couple
of words. . . ." He mopped with his handkerchief his red shaven chin,
then suddenly stepped back a pace, flung up his hands and opened his
eyes wide. "My dear girl, how long is this going on?" he said rapidly,
spluttering. "I ask you: is there no limit to it? I say nothing of the
demoralizing effect of his martinet views on all around him, of the way
he insults all that is sacred and best in me and in every honest
thinking man--I will say nothing about that, but he might at least behave
decently! Why, he shouts, he bellows, gives himself airs, poses as a
sort of Bonaparte, does not let one say a word. . . . I don't know what
the devil's the matter with him! These lordly gestures, this
condescending tone; and laughing like a general! Who is he, allow me to
ask you? I ask you, who is he? The husband of his wife, with a few
paltry acres and the rank of a titular who has had the luck to marry an
heiress! An upstart and a junker, like so many others! A type out of
Shtchedrin! Upon my word, it's either that he's suffering from
megalomania, or that old rat in his dotage, Count Alexey Petrovitch, is
right when he says that children and young people are a long time
growing up nowadays, and go on playing they are cabmen and generals till
they are forty!"
"That's true, that's true," Olga Mihalovna assented. "Let me pass."
"Now just consider: what is it leading to?" her uncle went on, barring
her way. "How will this playing at being a general and a Conservative
end? Already he has got into trouble! Yes, to stand his trial! I am very
glad of it! That's what his noise and shouting has brought him to--to
stand in the prisoner's dock. And it's not as though it were the Circuit
Court or something: it's the Central Court! Nothing worse could be
imagined, I think! And then he has quarrelled with every one! He is
celebrating his name-day, and look, Vostryakov's not here, nor Yahontov,
nor Vladimirov, nor Shevud, nor the Count. . . . There is no one, I
imagine, more Conservative than Count Alexey Petrovitch, yet even he has
not come. And he never will come again. He won't come, you will see!"
"My God! but what has it to do with me?" asked Olga Mihalovna.
"What has it to do with you? Why, you are his wife! You are clever, you
have had a university education, and it was in your power to make him an
honest worker!"
"At the lectures I went to they did not teach us how to influence
tiresome people. It seems as though I should have to apologize to all of
you for having been at the University," said Olga Mihalovna sharply.
"Listen, uncle. If people played the same scales over and over again the
whole day long in your hearing, you wouldn't be able to sit still and
listen, but would run away. I hear the same thing over again for days
together all the year round. You must have pity on me at last."
Her uncle pulled a very long face, then looked at her searchingly and
twisted his lips into a mocking smile.
"So that's how it is," he piped in a voice like an old woman's. "I beg
your pardon!" he said, and made a ceremonious bow. "If you have fallen
under his influence yourself, and have abandoned your convictions, you
should have said so before. I beg your pardon!"
"Yes, I have abandoned my convictions," she cried. "There; make the most
of it!"
"I beg your pardon!"
Her uncle for the last time made her a ceremonious bow, a little on one
side, and, shrinking into himself, made a scrape with his foot and
walked back.
"Idiot!" thought Olga Mihalovna. "I hope he will go home."
She found the ladies and the young people among the raspberries in the
kitchen garden. Some were eating raspberries; others, tired of eating
raspberries, were strolling about the strawberry beds or foraging among
the sugar-peas. A little on one side of the raspberry bed, near a
branching appletree propped up by posts which had been pulled out of an
old fence, Pyotr Dmitritch was mowing the grass. His hair was falling
over his forehead, his cravat was untied. His watch-chain was hanging
loose. Every step and every swing of the scythe showed skill and the
possession of immense physical strength. Near him were standing
Lubotchka and the daughters of a neighbour, Colonel Bukryeev--two anaemic
and unhealthily stout fair girls, Natalya and Valentina, or, as they
were always called, Nata and Vata, both wearing white frocks and
strikingly like each other. Pyotr Dmitritch was teaching them to mow.
"It's very simple," he said. "You have only to know how to hold the
scythe and not to get too hot over it--that is, not to use more force
than is necessary! Like this. . . . Wouldn't you like to try?" he said,
offering the scythe to Lubotchka. "Come!"
Lubotchka took the scythe clumsily, blushed crimson, and laughed.
"Don't be afraid, Lubov Alexandrovna!" cried Olga Mihalovna, loud enough
for all the ladies to hear that she was with them. "Don't be afraid! You
must learn! If you marry a Tolstoyan he will make you mow."
Lubotchka raised the scythe, but began laughing again, and, helpless
with laughter, let go of it at once. She was ashamed and pleased at
being talked to as though grown up. Nata, with a cold, serious face,
with no trace of smiling or shyness, took the scythe, swung it and
caught it in the grass; Vata, also without a smile, as cold and serious
as her sister, took the scythe, and silently thrust it into the earth.
Having done this, the two sisters linked arms and walked in silence to
the raspberries.
Pyotr Dmitritch laughed and played about like a boy, and this childish,
frolicsome mood in which he became exceedingly good-natured suited him
far better than any other. Olga Mihalovna loved him when he was like
that. But his boyishness did not usually last long. It did not this
time; after playing with the scythe, he for some reason thought it
necessary to take a serious tone about it.
"When I am mowing, I feel, do you know, healthier and more normal," he
said. "If I were forced to confine myself to an intellectual life I
believe I should go out of my mind. I feel that I was not born to be a
man of culture! I ought to mow, plough, sow, drive out the horses."
And Pyotr Dmitritch began a conversation with the ladies about the
advantages of physical labour, about culture, and then about the
pernicious effects of money, of property. Listening to her husband, Olga
Mihalovna, for some reason, thought of her dowry.
"And the time will come, I suppose," she thought, "when he will not
forgive me for being richer than he. He is proud and vain. Maybe he will
hate me because he owes so much to me."
She stopped near Colonel Bukryeev, who was eating raspberries and also
taking part in the conversation.
"Come," he said, making room for Olga Mihalovna and Pyotr Dmitritch.
"The ripest are here. . . . And so, according to Proudhon," he went on,
raising his voice, "property is robbery. But I must confess I don't
believe in Proudhon, and don't consider him a philosopher. The French
are not authorities, to my thinking--God bless them!"
"Well, as for Proudhons and Buckles and the rest of them, I am weak in
that department," said Pyotr Dmitritch. "For philosophy you must apply
to my wife. She has been at University lectures and knows all your
Schopenhauers and Proudhons by heart. . . ."
Olga Mihalovna felt bored again. She walked again along a little path by
apple and pear trees, and looked again as though she was on some very
important errand. She reached the gardener's cottage. In the doorway the
gardener's wife, Varvara, was sitting together with her four little
children with big shaven heads. Varvara, too, was with child and
expecting to be confined on Elijah's Day. After greeting her, Olga
Mihalovna looked at her and the children in silence and asked:
"Well, how do you feel?"
"Oh, all right. . . ."
A silence followed. The two women seemed to understand each other
without words.
"It's dreadful having one's first baby," said Olga Mihalovna after a
moment's thought. "I keep feeling as though I shall not get through it,
as though I shall die."
"I fancied that, too, but here I am alive. One has all sorts of
fancies."
Varvara, who was just going to have her fifth, looked down a little on
her mistress from the height of her experience and spoke in a rather
didactic tone, and Olga Mihalovna could not help feeling her authority;
she would have liked to have talked of her fears, of the child, of her
sensations, but she was afraid it might strike Varvara as naïve and
trivial. And she waited in silence for Varvara to say something herself.
"Olya, we are going indoors," Pyotr Dmitritch called from the
raspberries.
Olga Mihalovna liked being silent, waiting and watching Varvara. She
would have been ready to stay like that till night without speaking or
having any duty to perform. But she had to go. She had hardly left the
cottage when Lubotchka, Nata, and Vata came running to meet her. The
sisters stopped short abruptly a couple of yards away; Lubotchka ran
right up to her and flung herself on her neck.
"You dear, darling, precious," she said, kissing her face and her neck.
"Let us go and have tea on the island!"
"On the island, on the island!" said the precisely similar Nata and
Vata, both at once, without a smile.
"But it's going to rain, my dears."
"It's not, it's not," cried Lubotchka with a woebegone face. "They've
all agreed to go. Dear! darling!"
"They are all getting ready to have tea on the island," said Pyotr
Dmitritch, coming up. "See to arranging things. . . . We will all go in
the boats, and the samovars and all the rest of it must be sent in the
carriage with the servants."
He walked beside his wife and gave her his arm. Olga Mihalovna had a
desire to say something disagreeable to her husband, something biting,
even about her dowry perhaps--the crueller the better, she felt. She
thought a little, and said:
"Why is it Count Alexey Petrovitch hasn't come? What a pity!"
"I am very glad he hasn't come," said Pyotr Dmitritch, lying. "I'm sick
to death of that old lunatic."
"But yet before dinner you were expecting him so eagerly!" III
Half an hour later all the guests were crowding on the bank near the
pile to which the boats were fastened. They were all talking and
laughing, and were in such excitement and commotion that they could
hardly get into the boats. Three boats were crammed with passengers,
while two stood empty. The keys for unfastening these two boats had been
somehow mislaid, and messengers were continually running from the river
to the house to look for them. Some said Grigory had the keys, others
that the bailiff had them, while others suggested sending for a
blacksmith and breaking the padlocks. And all talked at once,
interrupting and shouting one another down. Pyotr Dmitritch paced
impatiently to and fro on the bank, shouting:
"What the devil's the meaning of it! The keys ought always to be lying
in the hall window! Who has dared to take them away? The bailiff can get
a boat of his own if he wants one!"
At last the keys were found. Then it appeared that two oars were
missing. Again there was a great hullabaloo. Pyotr Dmitritch, who was
weary of pacing about the bank, jumped into a long, narrow boat hollowed
out of the trunk of a poplar, and, lurching from side to side and almost
falling into the water, pushed off from the bank. The other boats
followed him one after another, amid loud laughter and the shrieks of
the young ladies.
The white cloudy sky, the trees on the riverside, the boats with the
people in them, and the oars, were reflected in the water as in a
mirror; under the boats, far away below in the bottomless depths, was a
second sky with the birds flying across it. The bank on which the house
and gardens stood was high, steep, and covered with trees; on the other,
which was sloping, stretched broad green water-meadows with sheets of
water glistening in them. The boats had floated a hundred yards when,
behind the mournfully drooping willows on the sloping banks, huts and a
herd of cows came into sight; they began to hear songs, drunken shouts,
and the strains of a concertina.
Here and there on the river fishing-boats were scattered about, setting
their nets for the night. In one of these boats was the festive party,
playing on home-made violins and violoncellos.
Olga Mihalovna was sitting at the rudder; she was smiling affably and
talking a great deal to entertain her visitors, while she glanced
stealthily at her husband. He was ahead of them all, standing up punting
with one oar. The light sharp-nosed canoe, which all the guests called
the "death-trap"--while Pyotr Dmitritch, for some reason, called it
Penderaklia--flew along quickly; it had a brisk, crafty expression, as
though it hated its heavy occupant and was looking out for a favourable
moment to glide away from under his feet. Olga Mihalovna kept looking at
her husband, and she loathed his good looks which attracted every one,
the back of his head, his attitude, his familiar manner with women; she
hated all the women sitting in the boat with her, was jealous, and at
the same time was trembling every minute in terror that the frail craft
would upset and cause an accident.
"Take care, Pyotr!" she cried, while her heart fluttered with terror.
"Sit down! We believe in your courage without all that!"
She was worried, too, by the people who were in the boat with her. They
were all ordinary good sort of people like thousands of others, but now
each one of them struck her as exceptional and evil. In each one of them
she saw nothing but falsity. "That young man," she thought, "rowing, in
gold-rimmed spectacles, with chestnut hair and a nice-looking beard: he
is a mamma's darling, rich, and well-fed, and always fortunate, and
every one considers him an honourable, free-thinking, advanced man. It's
not a year since he left the University and came to live in the
district, but he already talks of himself as 'we active members of the
Zemstvo.' But in another year he will be bored like so many others and
go off to Petersburg, and to justify running away, will tell every one
that the Zemstvos are good-for-nothing, and that he has been deceived in
them. While from the other boat his young wife keeps her eyes fixed on
him, and believes that he is 'an active member of the Zemstvo,' just as
in a year she will believe that the Zemstvo is good-for-nothing. And
that stout, carefully shaven gentleman in the straw hat with the broad
ribbon, with an expensive cigar in his mouth: he is fond of saying, 'It
is time to put away dreams and set to work!' He has Yorkshire pigs,
Butler's hives, rape-seed, pine-apples, a dairy, a cheese factory,
Italian bookkeeping by double entry; but every summer he sells his
timber and mortgages part of his land to spend the autumn with his
mistress in the Crimea. And there's Uncle Nikolay Nikolaitch, who has
quarrelled with Pyotr Dmitritch, and yet for some reason does not go
home."
Olga Mihalovna looked at the other boats, and there, too, she saw only
uninteresting, queer creatures, affected or stupid people. She thought
of all the people she knew in the district, and could not remember one
person of whom one could say or think anything good. They all seemed to
her mediocre, insipid, unintelligent, narrow, false, heartless; they all
said what they did not think, and did what they did not want to.
Dreariness and despair were stifling her; she longed to leave off
smiling, to leap up and cry out, "I am sick of you," and then jump out
and swim to the bank.
"I say, let's take Pyotr Dmitritch in tow!" some one shouted.
"In tow, in tow!" the others chimed in. "Olga Mihalovna, take your
husband in tow."
To take him in tow, Olga Mihalovna, who was steering, had to seize the
right moment and to catch bold of his boat by the chain at the beak.
When she bent over to the chain Pyotr Dmitritch frowned and looked at
her in alarm.
"I hope you won't catch cold," he said.
"If you are uneasy about me and the child, why do you torment me?"
thought Olga Mihalovna.
Pyotr Dmitritch acknowledged himself vanquished, and, not caring to be
towed, jumped from the Penderaklia into the boat which was overful
already, and jumped so carelessly that the boat lurched violently, and
every one cried out in terror.
"He did that to please the ladies," thought Olga Mihalovna; "he knows
it's charming." Her hands and feet began trembling, as she supposed,
from boredom, vexation from the strain of smiling and the discomfort she
felt all over her body. And to conceal this trembling from her guests,
she tried to talk more loudly, to laugh, to move.
"If I suddenly begin to cry," she thought, "I shall say I have
toothache. . . ."
But at last the boats reached the "Island of Good Hope," as they called
the peninsula formed by a bend in the river at an acute angle, covered
with a copse of old birch-trees, oaks, willows, and poplars. The tables
were already laid under the trees; the samovars were smoking, and
Vassily and Grigory, in their swallow-tails and white knitted gloves,
were already busy with the tea-things. On the other bank, opposite the
"Island of Good Hope," there stood the carriages which had come with the
provisions. The baskets and parcels of provisions were carried across to
the island in a little boat like the Penderaklia. The footmen, the
coachmen, and even the peasant who was sitting in the boat, had the
solemn expression befitting a name-day such as one only sees in children
and servants.
While Olga Mihalovna was making the tea and pouring out the first
glasses, the visitors were busy with the liqueurs and sweet things. Then
there was the general commotion usual at picnics over drinking tea, very
wearisome and exhausting for the hostess. Grigory and Vassily had hardly
had time to take the glasses round before hands were being stretched out
to Olga Mihalovna with empty glasses. One asked for no sugar, another
wanted it stronger, another weak, a fourth declined another glass. And
all this Olga Mihalovna had to remember, and then to call, "Ivan
Petrovitch, is it without sugar for you?" or, "Gentlemen, which of you
wanted it weak?" But the guest who had asked for weak tea, or no sugar,
had by now forgotten it, and, absorbed in agreeable conversation, took
the first glass that came. Depressed-looking figures wandered like
shadows at a little distance from the table, pretending to look for
mushrooms in the grass, or reading the labels on the boxes--these were
those for whom there were not glasses enough. "Have you had tea?" Olga
Mihalovna kept asking, and the guest so addressed begged her not to
trouble, and said, "I will wait," though it would have suited her better
for the visitors not to wait but to make haste.