the frail scaffolding, she looked at me, touched to tears and smiling.
"What a dear you are!" she said.
I remembered from my childhood how a green parrot, belonging to one of
the rich men of the town, had escaped from its cage, and how for quite a
month afterwards the beautiful bird had haunted the town, flying from
garden to garden, homeless and solitary. Mariya Viktorovna reminded me
of that bird.
"There is positively nowhere for me to go now but the cemetery," she
said to me with a laugh. "The town has become disgustingly dull. At the
Azhogins' they are still reciting, singing, lisping. I have grown to
detest them of late; your sister is an unsociable creature; Mademoiselle
Blagovo hates me for some reason. I don't care for the theatre. Tell me
where am I to go?"
When I went to see her I smelt of paint and turpentine, and my hands
were stained-and she liked that; she wanted me to come to her in my
ordinary working clothes; but in her drawing-room those clothes made me
feel awkward. I felt embarrassed, as though I were in uniform, so I
always put on my new serge trousers when I went to her. And she did not
like that.
"You must own you are not quite at home in your new character," she said
to me one day. "Your workman's dress does not feel natural to you; you
are awkward in it. Tell me, isn't that because you haven't a firm
conviction, and are not satisfied? The very kind of work you have
chosen-your painting-surely it does not satisfy you, does it?" she
asked, laughing. "I know paint makes things look nicer and last longer,
but those things belong to rich people who live in towns, and after all
they are luxuries. Besides, you have often said yourself that everybody
ought to get his bread by the work of his own hands, yet you get money
and not bread. Why shouldn't you keep to the literal sense of your
words? You ought to be getting bread, that is, you ought to be
ploughing, sowing, reaping, threshing, or doing something which has a
direct connection with agriculture, for instance, looking after cows,
digging, building huts of logs. . . ."
She opened a pretty cupboard that stood near her writing-table, and
said:
"I am saying all this to you because I want to let you into my secret.
Voil? ! This is my agricultural library. Here I have fields, kitchen
garden and orchard, and cattleyard and beehives. I read them greedily,
and have already learnt all the theory to the tiniest detail. My dream,
my darling wish, is to go to our Dubetchnya as soon as March is here.
It's marvellous there, exquisite, isn't it? The first year I shall have
a look round and get into things, and the year after I shall begin to
work properly myself, putting my back into it as they say. My father has
promised to give me Dubetchnya and I shall do exactly what I like with
it."
Flushed, excited to tears, and laughing, she dreamed aloud how she would
live at Dubetchnya, and what an interesting life it would be! I envied
her. March was near, the days were growing longer and longer, and on
bright sunny days water dripped from the roofs at midday, and there was
a fragrance of spring; I, too, longed for the country.
And when she said that she should move to Dubetchnya, I realized vividly
that I should remain in the town alone, and I felt that I envied her
with her cupboard of books and her agriculture. I knew nothing of work
on the land, and did not like it, and I should have liked to have told
her that work on the land was slavish toil, but I remembered that
something similar had been said more than once by my father, and I held
my tongue.
Lent began. Viktor Ivanitch, whose existence I had begun to forget,
arrived from Petersburg. He arrived unexpectedly, without even a
telegram to say he was coming. When I went in, as usual in the evening,
he was walking about the drawing-room, telling some story with his face
freshly washed and shaven, looking ten years younger: his daughter was
kneeling on the floor, taking out of his trunks boxes, bottles, and
books, and handing them to Pavel the footman. I involuntarily drew back
a step when I saw the engineer, but he held out both hands to me and
said, smiling, showing his strong white teeth that looked like a sledge-
driver's:
"Here he is, here he is! Very glad to see you, Mr. House-painter! Masha
has told me all about it; she has been singing your praises. I quite
understand and approve," he went on, taking my arm. "To be a good
workman is ever so much more honest and more sensible than wasting
government paper and wearing a cockade on your head. I myself worked in
Belgium with these very hands and then spent two years as a mechanic. .
. ."
He was wearing a short reefer jacket and indoor slippers; he walked like
a man with the gout, rolling slightly from side to side and rubbing his
hands. Humming something he softly purred and hugged himself with
satisfaction at being at home again at last, and able to have his
beloved shower bath.
"There is no disputing," he said to me at supper, "there is no
disputing; you are all nice and charming people, but for some reason, as
soon as you take to manual labour, or go in for saving the peasants, in
the long run it all comes to no more than being a dissenter. Aren't you
a dissenter? Here you don't take vodka. What's the meaning of that if it
is not being a dissenter?"
To satisfy him I drank some vodka and I drank some wine, too. We tasted
the cheese, the sausage, the pâtés, the pickles, and the savouries of
all sorts that the engineer had brought with him, and the wine that had
come in his absence from abroad. The wine was first-rate. For some
reason the engineer got wine and cigars from abroad without paying duty;
the caviare and the dried sturgeon someone sent him for nothing; he did
not pay rent for his flat as the owner of the house provided the
kerosene for the line; and altogether he and his daughter produced on me
the impression that all the best in the world was at their service, and
provided for them for nothing.
I went on going to see them, but not with the same eagerness. The
engineer made me feel constrained, and in his presence I did not feel
free. I could not face his clear, guileless eyes, his reflections
wearied and sickened me; I was sickened, too, by the memory that so
lately I had been in the employment of this red-faced, well-fed man, and
that he had been brutally rude to me. It is true that he put his arm
round my waist, slapped me on the shoulder in a friendly way, approved
my manner of life, but I felt that, as before, he despised my
insignificance, and only put up with me to please his daughter, and I
couldn't now laugh and talk as I liked, and I behaved unsociably and
kept expecting that in another minute he would address me as Panteley as
he did his footman Pavel. How my pride as a provincial and a working man
was revolted. I, a proletarian, a house painter, went every day to rich
people who were alien to me, and whom the whole town regarded as though
they were foreigners, and every day I drank costly wines with them and
ate unusual dainties-my conscience refused to be reconciled to it! On my
way to the house I sullenly avoided meeting people, and looked at them
from under my brows as though I really were a dissenter, and when I was
going home from the engineer's I was ashamed of my well-fed condition.
Above all I was afraid of being carried away. Whether I was walking
along the street, or working, or talking to the other fellows, I was all
the time thinking of one thing only, of going in the evening to see
Mariya Viktorovna and was picturing her voice, her laugh, her movements.
When I was getting ready to go to her I always spent a long time before
my nurse's warped looking-glass, as I fastened my tie; my serge trousers
were detestable in my eyes, and I suffered torments, and at the same
time despised myself for being so trivial. When she called to me out of
the other room that she was not dressed and asked me to wait, I listened
to her dressing; it agitated me, I felt as though the ground were giving
way under my feet. And when I saw a woman's figure in the street, even
at a distance, I invariably compared it. It seemed to me that all our
girls and women were vulgar, that they were absurdly dressed, and did
not know how to hold themselves; and these comparisons aroused a feeling
of pride in me: Mariya Viktorovna was the best of them all! And I
dreamed of her and myself at night.
One evening at supper with the engineer we ate a whole lobster As I was
going home afterwards I remembered that the engineer twice called me "My
dear fellow" at supper, and I reflected that they treated me very kindly
in that house, as they might an unfortunate big dog who had been kicked
out by its owners, that they were amusing themselves with me, and that
when they were tired of me they would turn me out like a dog. I felt
ashamed and wounded, wounded to the point of tears as though I had been
insulted, and looking up at the sky I took a vow to put an end to all
this.
The next day I did not go to the Dolzhikov's. Late in the evening, when
it was quite dark and raining, I walked along Great Dvoryansky Street,
looking up at the windows. Everyone was asleep at the Azhogins', and the
only light was in one of the furthest windows. It was Madame Azhogin in
her own room, sewing by the light of three candles, imagining that she
was combating superstition. Our house was in darkness, but at the
Dolzhikovs', on the contrary, the windows were lighted up, but one could
distinguish nothing through the flowers and the curtains. I kept walking
up and down the street; the cold March rain drenched me through. I heard
my father come home from the club; he stood knocking at the gate. A
minute later a light appeared at the window, and I saw my sister, who
was hastening down with a lamp, while with the other hand she was
twisting her thick hair together as she went. Then my father walked
about the drawing-room, talking and rubbing his hands, while my sister
sat in a low chair, thinking and not listening to what he said.
But then they went away; the light went out. . . . I glanced round at
the engineer's, and there, too, all was darkness now. In the dark and
the rain I felt hopelessly alone, abandoned to the whims of destiny; I
felt that all my doings, my desires, and everything I had thought and
said till then were trivial in comparison with my loneliness, in
comparison with my present suffering, and the suffering that lay before
me in the future. Alas, the thoughts and doings of living creatures are
not nearly so significant as their sufferings! And without clearly
realizing what I was doing, I pulled at the bell of the Dolzhikovs'
gate, broke it, and ran along the street like some naughty boy, with a
feeling of terror in my heart, expecting every moment that they would
come out and recognize me. When I stopped at the end of the street to
take breath I could hear nothing but the sound of the rain, and
somewhere in the distance a watchman striking on a sheet of iron.
For a whole week I did not go to the Dolzhikovs'. My serge trousers were
sold. There was nothing doing in the painting trade. I knew the pangs of
hunger again, and earned from twopence to fourpence a day, where I
could, by heavy and unpleasant work. Struggling up to my knees in the
cold mud, straining my chest, I tried to stifle my memories, and, as it
were, to punish myself for the cheeses and preserves with which I had
been regaled at the engineer's. But all the same, as soon as I lay in
bed, wet and hungry, my sinful imagination immediately began to paint
exquisite, seductive pictures, and with amazement I acknowledged to
myself that I was in love, passionately in love, and I fell into a
sound, heavy sleep, feeling that hard labour only made my body stronger
and younger.
One evening snow began falling most inappropriately, and the wind blew
from the north as though winter had come back again. When I returned
from work that evening I found Mariya Viktorovna in my room. She was
sitting in her fur coat, and had both hands in her muff.
"Why don't you come to see me?" she asked, raising her clear, clever
eyes, and I was utterly confused with delight and stood stiffly upright
before her, as I used to stand facing my father when he was going to
beat me; she looked into my face and I could see from her eyes that she
understood why I was confused.
"Why don't you come to see me?" she repeated. "If you don't want to
come, you see, I have come to you."
She got up and came close to me.
"Don't desert me," she said, and her eyes filled with tears. "I am
alone, utterly alone."
She began crying; and, hiding her face in her muff, articulated:
"Alone! My life is hard, very hard, and in all the world I have no one
but you. Don't desert me!"
Looking for a handkerchief to wipe her tears she smiled; we were silent
for some time, then I put my arms round her and kissed her, scratching
my cheek till it bled with her hatpin as I did it.
And we began talking to each other as though we had been on the closest
terms for ages and ages. X
Two days later she sent me to Dubetchnya and I was unutterably delighted
to go. As I walked towards the station and afterwards, as I was sitting
in the train, I kept laughing from no apparent cause, and people looked
at me as though I were drunk. Snow was falling, and there were still
frosts in the mornings, but the roads were already dark-coloured and
rooks hovered over them, cawing.
At first I had intended to fit up an abode for us two, Masha and me, in
the lodge at the side opposite Madame Tcheprakov's lodge, but it
appeared that the doves and the ducks had been living there for a long
time, and it was impossible to clean it without destroying a great
number of nests. There was nothing for it but to live in the comfortless
rooms of the big house with the sunblinds. The peasants called the house
the palace; there were more than twenty rooms in it, and the only
furniture was a piano and a child's arm-chair lying in the attic. And if
Masha had brought all her furniture from the town we should even then
have been unable to get rid of the impression of immense emptiness and
cold. I picked out three small rooms with windows looking into the
garden, and worked from early morning till night, setting them to
rights, putting in new panes, papering the walls, filling up the holes
and chinks in the floors. It was easy, pleasant work. I was continually
running to the river to see whether the ice were not going; I kept
fancying that starlings were flying. And at night, thinking of Masha, I
listened with an unutterably sweet feeling, with clutching delight to
the noise of the rats and the wind droning and knocking above the
ceiling. It seemed as though some old house spirit were coughing in the
attic.
The snow was deep; a great deal had fallen even at the end of March, but
it melted quickly, as though by magic, and the spring floods passed in a
tumultuous rush, so that by the beginning of April the starlings were
already noisy, and yellow butterflies were flying in the garden. It was
exquisite weather. Every day, towards evening, I used to walk to the
town to meet Masha, and what a delight it was to walk with bare feet
along the gradually drying, still soft road. Half-way I used to sit down
and look towards the town, not venturing to go near it. The sight of it
troubled me. I kept wondering how the people I knew would behave to me
when they heard of my love. What would my father say? What troubled me
particularly was the thought that my life was more complicated, and that
I had completely lost all power to set it right, and that, like a
balloon, it was bearing me away, God knows whither. I no longer
considered the problem how to earn my daily bread, how to live, but
thought about-I really don't know what.
Masha used to come in a carriage; I used to get in with her, and we
drove to Dubetchnya, feeling light-hearted and free. Or, after waiting
till the sun had set, I would go back dissatisfied and dreary, wondering
why Masha had not come; at the gate or in the garden I would be met by a
sweet, unexpected apparition-it was she! It would turn out that she had
come by rail, and had walked from the station. What a festival it was!
In a simple woollen dress with a kerchief on her head, with a modest
sunshade, but laced in, slender, in expensive foreign boots-it was a
talented actress playing the part of a little workgirl. We looked round
our domain and decided which should be her room, and which mine, where
we would have our avenue, our kitchen garden, our beehives.
We already had hens, ducks, and geese, which we loved because they were
ours. We had, all ready for sowing, oats, clover, timothy grass,
buckwheat, and vegetable seeds, and we always looked at all these stores
and discussed at length the crop we might get; and everything Masha said
to me seemed extraordinarily clever, and fine. This was the happiest
time of my life.
Soon after St. Thomas's week we were married at our parish church in the
village of Kurilovka, two miles from Dubetchnya. Masha wanted everything
to be done quietly; at her wish our "best men" were peasant lads, the
sacristan sang alone, and we came back from the church in a small,
jolting chaise which she drove herself. Our only guest from the town was
my sister Kleopatra, to whom Masha sent a note three days before the
wedding. My sister came in a white dress and wore gloves. During the
wedding she cried quietly from joy and tenderness. Her expression was
motherly and infinitely kind. She was intoxicated with our happiness,
and smiled as though she were absorbing a sweet delirium, and looking at
her during our wedding, I realized that for her there was nothing in the
world higher than love, earthly love, and that she was dreaming of it
secretly, timidly, but continually and passionately. She embraced and
kissed Masha, and, not knowing how to express her rapture, said to her
of me: "He is good! He is very good!"
Before she went away she changed into her ordinary dress, and drew me
into the garden to talk to me alone.
"Father is very much hurt," she said, "that you have written nothing to
him. You ought to have asked for his blessing. But in reality he is very
much pleased. He says that this marriage will raise you in the eyes of
all society, and that under the influence of Mariya Viktorovna you will
begin to take a more serious view of life. We talk of nothing but you in
the evenings now, and yesterday he actually used the expression: 'Our
Misail.' That pleased me. It seems as though he had some plan in his
mind, and I fancy he wants to set you an example of magnanimity and be
the first to speak of reconciliation. It is very possible he may come
here to see you in a day or two."
She hurriedly made the sign of the cross over me several times and said:
"Well, God be with you. Be happy. Anyuta Blagovo is a very clever girl;
she says about your marriage that God is sending you a fresh ordeal. To
be sure-married life does not bring only joy but suffering too. That's
bound to be so."
Masha and I walked a couple of miles to see her on her way; we walked
back slowly and in silence, as though we were resting. Masha held my
hand, my heart felt light, and I had no inclination to talk about love;
we had become closer and more akin now that we were married, and we felt
that nothing now could separate us.
"Your sister is a nice creature," said Masha, "but it seems as though
she had been tormented for years. Your father must be a terrible man."
I began telling her how my sister and I had been brought up, and what a
senseless torture our childhood had really been. When she heard how my
father had so lately beaten me, she shuddered and drew closer to me.
"Don't tell me any more," she said. "It's horrible!"
Now she never left me. We lived together in the three rooms in the big
house, and in the evenings we bolted the door which led to the empty
part of the house, as though someone were living there whom we did not
know, and were afraid of. I got up early, at dawn, and immediately set
to work of some sort. I mended the carts, made paths in the garden, dug
the flower beds, painted the roof of the house. When the time came to
sow the oats I tried to plough the ground over again, to harrow and to
sow, and I did it all conscientiously, keeping up with our labourer; I
was worn out, the rain and the cold wind made my face and feet burn for
hours afterwards. I dreamed of ploughed land at night. But field labour
did not attract me. I did not understand farming, and I did not care for
it; it was perhaps because my forefathers had not been tillers of the
soil, and the very blood that flowed in my veins was purely of the city.
I loved nature tenderly; I loved the fields and meadows and kitchen
gardens, but the peasant who turned up the soil with his plough and
urged on his pitiful horse, wet and tattered, with his craning neck, was
to me the expression of coarse, savage, ugly force, and every time I
looked at his uncouth movements I involuntarily began thinking of the
legendary life of the remote past, before men knew the use of fire. The
fierce bull that ran with the peasants' herd, and the horses, when they
dashed about the village, stamping their hoofs, moved me to fear, and
everything rather big, strong, and angry, whether it was the ram with
its horns, the gander, or the yard-dog, seemed to me the expression of
the same coarse, savage force. This mood was particularly strong in me
in bad weather, when heavy clouds were hanging over the black ploughed
land. Above all, when I was ploughing or sowing, and two or three people
stood looking how I was doing it, I had not the feeling that this work
was inevitable and obligatory, and it seemed to me that I was amusing
myself. I preferred doing something in the yard, and there was nothing I
liked so much as painting the roof.
I used to walk through the garden and the meadow to our mill. It was let
to a peasant of Kurilovka called Stepan, a handsome, dark fellow with a
thick black beard, who looked very strong. He did not like the miller's
work, and looked upon it as dreary and unprofitable, and only lived at
the mill in order not to live at home. He was a leather-worker, and was
always surrounded by a pleasant smell of tar and leather. He was not
fond of talking, he was listless and sluggish, and was always sitting in
the doorway or on the river bank, humming "oo-loo-loo." His wife and
mother-in-law, both white-faced, languid, and meek, used sometimes to
come from Kurilovka to see him; they made low bows to him and addressed
him formally, "Stepan Petrovitch," while he went on sitting on the river
bank, softly humming "oo-loo-loo," without responding by word or
movement to their bows. One hour and then a second would pass in
silence. His mother-in-law and wife, after whispering together, would
get up and gaze at him for some time, expecting him to look round; then
they would make a low bow, and in sugary, chanting voices, say:
"Good-bye, Stepan Petrovitch!"
And they would go away. After that Stepan, picking up the parcel they
had left, containing cracknels or a shirt, would heave a sigh and say,
winking in their direction:
"The female sex!"
The mill with two sets of millstones worked day and night. I used to
help Stepan; I liked the work, and when he went off I was glad to stay
and take his place. XI
After bright warm weather came a spell of wet; all May it rained and was
cold. The sound of the millwheels and of the rain disposed one to
indolence and slumber. The floor trembled, there was a smell of flour,
and that, too, induced drowsiness. My wife in a short fur-lined jacket,
and in men's high golosh boots, would make her appearance twice a day,
and she always said the same thing:
"And this is called summer! Worse than it was in October!"
We used to have tea and make the porridge together, or we would sit for
hours at a stretch without speaking, waiting for the rain to stop. Once,
when Stepan had gone off to the fair, Masha stayed all night at the
mill. When we got up we could not tell what time it was, as the
rainclouds covered the whole sky; but sleepy cocks were crowing at
Dubetchnya, and landrails were calling in the meadows; it was still
very, very early. . . . My wife and I went down to the millpond and drew
out the net which Stepan had thrown in over night in our presence. A big
pike was struggling in it, and a cray-fish was twisting about, clawing
upwards with its pincers.
"Let them go," said Masha. "Let them be happy too."