very long, the longest day in my life. Towards evening Stepan came back
and I went home.
"Your father came to-day," said Masha.
"Where is he?" I asked.
"He has gone away. I would not see him."
Seeing that I remained standing and silent, that I was sorry for my
father, she said:
"One must be consistent. I would not see him, and sent word to him not
to trouble to come and see us again."
A minute later I was out at the gate and walking to the town to explain
things to my father. It was muddy, slippery, cold. For the first time
since my marriage I felt suddenly sad, and in my brain exhausted by that
long, grey day, there was stirring the thought that perhaps I was not
living as I ought. I was worn out; little by little I was overcome by
despondency and indolence, I did not want to move or think, and after
going on a little I gave it up with a wave of my hand and turned back.
The engineer in a leather overcoat with a hood was standing in the
middle of the yard.
"Where's the furniture? There used to be lovely furniture in the Empire
style: there used to be pictures, there used to be vases, while now you
could play ball in it! I bought the place with the furniture. The devil
take her!"
Moisey, a thin pock-marked fellow of twenty-five, with insolent little
eyes, who was in the service of the general's widow, stood near him
crumpling up his cap in his hands; one of his cheeks was bigger than the
other, as though he had lain too long on it.
"Your honour was graciously pleased to buy the place without the
furniture," he brought out irresolutely; "I remember."
"Hold your tongue!" shouted the engineer; he turned crimson and shook
with anger . . . and the echo in the garden loudly repeated his shout.
XII
When I was doing anything in the garden or the yard, Moisey would stand
beside me, and folding his arms behind his back he would stand lazily
and impudently staring at me with his little eyes. And this irritated me
to such a degree that I threw up my work and went away.
From Stepan we heard that Moisey was Madame Tcheprakov's lover. I
noticed that when people came to her to borrow money they addressed
themselves first to Moisey, and once I saw a peasant, black from head to
foot-he must have been a coalheaver-bow down at Moisey's feet.
Sometimes, after a little whispering, he gave out money himself, without
consulting his mistress, from which I concluded that he did a little
business on his own account.
He used to shoot in our garden under our windows, carried off victuals
from our cellar, borrowed our horses without asking permission, and we
were indignant and began to feel as though Dubetchnya were not ours, and
Masha would say, turning pale:
"Can we really have to go on living with these reptiles another eighteen
months?"
Madame Tcheprakov's son, Ivan, was serving as a guard on our railway-
line. He had grown much thinner and feebler during the winter, so that a
single glass was enough to make him drunk, and he shivered out of the
sunshine. He wore the guard's uniform with aversion and was ashamed of
it, but considered his post a good one, as he could steal the candles
and sell them. My new position excited in him a mixed feeling of wonder,
envy, and a vague hope that something of the same sort might happen to
him. He used to watch Masha with ecstatic eyes, ask me what I had for
dinner now, and his lean and ugly face wore a sad and sweetish
expression, and he moved his fingers as though he were feeling my
happiness with them.
"Listen, Better-than-nothing," he said fussily, relighting his cigarette
at every instant; there was always a litter where he stood, for he
wasted dozens of matches, lighting one cigarette. "Listen, my life now
is the nastiest possible. The worst of it is any subaltern can shout:
'Hi, there, guard!' I have overheard all sorts of things in the train,
my boy, and do you know, I have learned that life's a beastly thing! My
mother has been the ruin of me! A doctor in the train told me that if
parents are immoral, their children are drunkards or criminals. Think of
that!"
Once he came into the yard, staggering; his eyes gazed about blankly,
his breathing was laboured; he laughed and cried and babbled as though
in a high fever, and the only words I could catch in his muddled talk
were, "My mother! Where's my mother?" which he uttered with a wail like
a child who has lost his mother in a crowd. I led him into our garden
and laid him down under a tree, and Masha and I took turns to sit by him
all that day and all night. He was very sick, and Masha looked with
aversion at his pale, wet face, and said:
"Is it possible these reptiles will go on living another year and a half
in our yard? It's awful! it's awful!"
And how many mortifications the peasants caused us! How many bitter
disappointments in those early days in the spring months, when we so
longed to be happy. My wife built a school. I drew a plan of a school
for sixty boys, and the Zemstvo Board approved of it, but advised us to
build the school at Kurilovka the big village which was only two miles
from us. Moreover, the school at Kurilovka in which children-from four
villages, our Dubetchnya being one of the number-were taught, was old
and too small, and the floor was scarcely safe to walk upon. At the end
of March at Masha's wish, she was appointed guardian of the Kurilovka
school, and at the beginning of April we three times summoned the
village assembly, and tried to persuade the peasants that their school
was old and overcrowded, and that it was essential to build a new one. A
member of the Zemstvo Board and the Inspector of Peasant Schools came,
and they, too, tried to persuade them. After each meeting the peasants
surrounded us, begging for a bucket of vodka; we were hot in the crowd;
we were soon exhausted, and returned home dissatisfied and a little ill
at ease. In the end the peasants set apart a plot of ground for the
school, and were obliged to bring all the building material from the
town with their own horses. And the very first Sunday after the spring
corn was sown carts set off from Kurilovka and Dubetchnya to fetch
bricks for the foundations. They set off as soon as it was light, and
came back late in the evening; the peasants were drunk, and said they
were worn out.
As ill-luck would have it, the rain and the cold persisted all through
May. The road was in an awful state: it was deep in mud. The carts
usually drove into our yard when they came back from the town-and what a
horrible ordeal it was. A potbellied horse would appear at the gate,
setting its front legs wide apart; it would stumble forward before
coming into the yard; a beam, nine yards long, wet and slimy-looking,
crept in on a waggon. Beside it, muffled up against the rain, strode a
peasant with the skirts of his coat tucked up in his belt, not looking
where he was going, but stepping through the puddles. Another cart would
appear with boards, then a third with a beam, a fourth . . . and the
space before our house was gradually crowded up with horses, beams, and
planks. Men and women, with their heads muffled and their skirts tucked
up, would stare angrily at our windows, make an uproar, and clamour for
the mistress to come out to them; coarse oaths were audible. Meanwhile
Moisey stood at one side, and we fancied he was enjoying our
discomfiture.
"We are not going to cart any more," the peasants would shout. "We are
worn out! Let her go and get the stuff herself."
Masha, pale and flustered, expecting every minute that they would break
into the house, would send them out a half-pail of vodka; after that the
noise would subside and the long beams, one after another, would crawl
slowly out of the yard.
When I was setting off to see the building my wife was worried and said:
"The peasants are spiteful; I only hope they won't do you a mischief.
Wait a minute, I'll come with you."
We drove to Kurilovka together, and there the carpenters asked us for a
drink. The framework of the house was ready. It was time to lay the
foundation, but the masons had not come; this caused delay, and the
carpenters complained. And when at last the masons did come, it appeared
that there was no sand; it had been somehow overlooked that it would be
needed. Taking advantage of our helpless position, the peasants demanded
thirty kopecks for each cartload, though the distance from the building
to the river where they got the sand was less than a quarter of a mile,
and more than five hundred cartloads were found to be necessary. There
was no end to the misunderstandings, swearing, and importunity; my wife
was indignant, and the foreman of the masons, Tit Petrov, an old man of
seventy, took her by the arm, and said:
"You look here! You look here! You only bring me the sand; I set ten men
on at once, and in two days it will be done! You look here!"
But they brought the sand and two days passed, and four, and a week, and
instead of the promised foundations there was still a yawning hole.
"It's enough to drive one out of one's senses," said my wife, in
distress. "What people! What people!"
In the midst of these disorderly doings the engineer arrived; he brought
with him parcels of wine and savouries, and after a prolonged meal lay
down for a nap in the verandah and snored so loudly that the labourers
shook their heads and said: "Well!"
Masha was not pleased at his coming, she did not trust him, though at
the same time she asked his advice. When, after sleeping too long after
dinner, he got up in a bad humour and said unpleasant things about our
management of the place, or expressed regret that he had bought
Dubetchnya, which had already been a loss to him, poor Masha's face wore
an expression of misery. She would complain to him, and he would yawn
and say that the peasants ought to be flogged.
He called our marriage and our life a farce, and said it was a caprice,
a whim.
"She has done something of the sort before," he said about Masha. "She
once fancied herself a great opera singer and left me; I was looking for
her for two months, and, my dear soul, I spent a thousand roubles on
telegrams alone."
He no longer called me a dissenter or Mr. Painter, and did not as in the
past express approval of my living like a workman, but said:
"You are a strange person! You are not a normal person! I won't venture
to prophesy, but you will come to a bad end!"
And Masha slept badly at night, and was always sitting at our bedroom
window thinking. There was no laughter at supper now, no charming
grimaces. I was wretched, and when it rained, every drop that fell
seemed to pierce my heart, like small shot, and I felt ready to fall on
my knees before Masha and apologize for the weather. When the peasants
made a noise in the yard I felt guilty also. For hours at a time I sat
still in one place, thinking of nothing but what a splendid person Masha
was, what a wonderful person. I loved her passionately, and I was
fascinated by everything she did, everything she said. She had a bent
for quiet, studious pursuits; she was fond of reading for hours
together, of studying. Although her knowledge of farming was only from
books she surprised us all by what she knew; and every piece of advice
she gave was of value; not one was ever thrown away; and, with all that,
what nobility, what taste, what graciousness, that graciousness which is
only found in well-educated people.
To this woman, with her sound, practical intelligence, the disorderly
surroundings with petty cares and sordid anxieties in which we were
living now were an agony: I saw that and could not sleep at night; my
brain worked feverishly and I had a lump in my throat. I rushed about
not knowing what to do.
I galloped to the town and brought Masha books, newspapers, sweets,
flowers; with Stepan I caught fish, wading for hours up to my neck in
the cold water in the rain to catch eel-pout to vary our fare; I
demeaned myself to beg the peasants not to make a noise; I plied them
with vodka, bought them off, made all sorts of promises. And how many
other foolish things I did!
At last the rain ceased, the earth dried. One would get up at four
o'clock in the morning; one would go out into the garden-where there was
dew sparkling on the flowers, the twitter of birds, the hum of insects,
not one cloud in the sky; and the garden, the meadows, and the river
were so lovely, yet there were memories of the peasants, of their carts,
of the engineer. Masha and I drove out together in the racing droshky to
the fields to look at the oats. She used to drive, I sat behind; her
shoulders were raised and the wind played with her hair.
"Keep to the right!" she shouted to those she met.
"You are like a sledge-driver," I said to her one day.
"Maybe! Why, my grandfather, the engineer's father, was a sledge-driver.
Didn't you know that?" she asked, turning to me, and at once she
mimicked the way sledge-drivers shout and sing.
"And thank God for that," I thought as I listened to her. "Thank God."
And again memories of the peasants, of the carts, of the engineer. . . .
XIII
Dr. Blagovo arrived on his bicycle. My sister began coming often. Again
there were conversations about manual labour, about progress, about a
mysterious millennium awaiting mankind in the remote future. The doctor
did not like our farmwork, because it interfered with arguments, and
said that ploughing, reaping, grazing calves were unworthy of a free
man, and all these coarse forms of the struggle for existence men would
in time relegate to animals and machines, while they would devote
themselves exclusively to scientific investigation. My sister kept
begging them to let her go home earlier, and if she stayed on till late
in the evening, or spent the night with us, there would be no end to the
agitation.
"Good Heavens, what a baby you are still!" said Masha reproachfully. "It
is positively absurd."
"Yes, it is absurd," my sister agreed, "I know it's absurd; but what is
to be done if I haven't the strength to get over it? I keep feeling as
though I were doing wrong."
At haymaking I ached all over from the unaccustomed labour; in the
evening, sitting on the verandah and talking with the others, I suddenly
dropped asleep, and they laughed aloud at me. They waked me up and made
me sit down to supper; I was overpowered with drowsiness and I saw the
lights, the faces, and the plates as it were in a dream, heard the
voices, but did not understand them. And getting up early in the
morning, I took up the scythe at once, or went to the building and
worked hard all day.
When I remained at home on holidays I noticed that my sister and Masha
were concealing something from me, and even seemed to be avoiding me. My
wife was tender to me as before, but she had thoughts of her own apart,
which she did not share with me. There was no doubt that her
exasperation with the peasants was growing, the life was becoming more
and more distasteful to her, and yet she did not complain to me. She
talked to the doctor now more readily than she did to me, and I did not
understand why it was so.
It was the custom in our province at haymaking and harvest time for the
labourers to come to the manor house in the evening and be regaled with
vodka; even young girls drank a glass. We did not keep up this practice;
the mowers and the peasant women stood about in our yard till late in
the evening expecting vodka, and then departed abusing us. And all the
time Masha frowned grimly and said nothing, or murmured to the doctor
with exasperation: "Savages! Petchenyegs!"
In the country newcomers are met ungraciously, almost with hostility, as
they are at school. And we were received in this way. At first we were
looked upon as stupid, silly people, who had bought an estate simply
because we did not know what to do with our money. We were laughed at.
The peasants grazed their cattle in our wood and even in our garden;
they drove away our cows and horses to the village, and then demanded
money for the damage done by them. They came in whole companies into our
yard, and loudly clamoured that at the mowing we had cut some piece of
land that did not belong to us; and as we did not yet know the
boundaries of our estate very accurately, we took their word for it and
paid damages. Afterwards it turned out that there had been no mistake at
the mowing. They barked the lime-trees in our wood. One of the
Dubetchnya peasants, a regular shark, who did a trade in vodka without a
licence, bribed our labourers, and in collaboration with them cheated us
in a most treacherous way. They took the new wheels off our carts and
replaced them with old ones, stole our ploughing harness and actually
sold them to us, and so on. But what was most mortifying of all was what
happened at the building; the peasant women stole by night boards,
bricks, tiles, pieces of iron. The village elder with witnesses made a
search in their huts; the village meeting fined them two roubles each,
and afterwards this money was spent on drink by the whole commune.
When Masha heard about this, she would say to the doctor or my sister
indignantly:
"What beasts! It's awful! awful!"
And I heard her more than once express regret that she had ever taken it
into her head to build the school.
"You must understand," the doctor tried to persuade her, "that if you
build this school and do good in general, it's not for the sake of the
peasants, but in the name of culture, in the name of the future; and the
worse the peasants are the more reason for building the school.
Understand that!"
But there was a lack of conviction in his voice, and it seemed to me
that both he and Masha hated the peasants.
Masha often went to the mill, taking my sister with her, and they both
said, laughing, that they went to have a look at Stepan, he was so
handsome. Stepan, it appeared, was torpid and taciturn only with men; in
feminine society his manners were free and easy, and he talked
incessantly. One day, going down to the river to bathe, I accidentally
overheard a conversation. Masha and Kleopatra, both in white dresses,
were sitting on the bank in the spreading shade of a willow, and Stepan
was standing by them with his hands behind his back, and was saying:
"Are peasants men? They are not men, but, asking your pardon, wild
beasts, impostors. What life has a peasant? Nothing but eating and
drinking; all he cares for is victuals to be cheaper and swilling liquor
at the tavern like a fool; and there's no conversation, no manners, no
formality, nothing but ignorance! He lives in filth, his wife lives in
filth, and his children live in filth. What he stands up in, he lies
down to sleep in; he picks the potatoes out of the soup with his
fingers; he drinks kvass with a cockroach in it, and doesn't bother to
blow it away!"
"It's their poverty, of course," my sister put in.
"Poverty? There is want to be sure, there's different sorts of want,
Madam. If a man is in prison, or let us say blind or crippled, that
really is trouble I wouldn't wish anyone, but if a man's free and has
all his senses, if he has his eyes and his hands and his strength and
God, what more does he want? It's cockering themselves, and it's
ignorance, Madam, it's not poverty. If you, let us suppose, good
gentlefolk, by your education, wish out of kindness to help him he will
drink away your money in his low way; or, what's worse, he will open a
drinkshop, and with your money start robbing the people. You say
poverty, but does the rich peasant live better? He, too, asking your
pardon, lives like a swine: coarse, loud-mouthed, cudgel-headed, broader
than he is long, fat, red-faced mug, I'd like to swing my fist and send
him flying, the scoundrel. There's Larion, another rich one at
Dubetchnya, and I bet he strips the bark off your trees as much as any
poor one; and he is a foul-mouthed fellow; his children are the same,
and when he has had a drop too much he'll topple with his nose in a
puddle and sleep there. They are all a worthless lot, Madam. If you live
in a village with them it is like hell. It has stuck in my teeth, that
village has, and thank the Lord, the King of Heaven, I've plenty to eat
and clothes to wear, I served out my time in the dragoons, I was village
elder for three years, and now I am a free Cossack, I live where I like.
I don't want to live in the village, and no one has the right to force
me. They say-my wife. They say you are bound to live in your cottage
with your wife. But why so? I am not her hired man."
"Tell me, Stepan, did you marry for love?" asked Masha.
"Love among us in the village!" answered Stepan, and he gave a laugh.
"Properly speaking, Madam, if you care to know, this is my second
marriage. I am not a Kurilovka man, I am from Zalegoshtcho, but
afterwards I was taken into Kurilovka when I married. You see my father
did not want to divide the land among us. There were five of us
brothers. I took my leave and went to another village to live with my
wife's family, but my first wife died when she was young."
"What did she die of?"
"Of foolishness. She used to cry and cry and cry for no reason, and so
she pined away. She was always drinking some sort of herbs to make her
better looking, and I suppose she damaged her inside. And my second wife
is a Kurilovka woman too, there is nothing in her. She's a village
woman, a peasant woman, and nothing more. I was taken in when they
plighted me to her. I thought she was young and fair-skinned, and that
they lived in a clean way. Her mother was just like a Flagellant and she
drank coffee, and the chief thing, to be sure, they were clean in their
ways. So I married her, and next day we sat down to dinner; I bade my
mother-in-law give me a spoon, and she gives me a spoon, and I see her
wipe it out with her finger. So much for you, thought I; nice sort of
cleanliness yours is. I lived a year with them and then I went away. I
might have married a girl from the town," he went on after a pause.
"They say a wife is a helpmate to her husband. What do I want with a
helpmate? I help myself; I'd rather she talked to me, and not clack,
clack, clack, but circumstantially, feelingly. What is life without good
conversation?"
Stepan suddenly paused, and at once there was the sound of his dreary,
monotonous "oo-loo-loo-loo." This meant that he had seen me.
Masha used often to go to the mill, and evidently found pleasure in her
conversations with Stepan. Stepan abused the peasants with such
sincerity and conviction, and she was attracted to him. Every time she
came back from the mill the feeble-minded peasant, who looked after the
garden, shouted at her:
"Wench Palashka! Hulla, wench Palashka!" and he would bark like a dog:
"Ga! Ga!"
And she would stop and look at him attentively, as though in that
idiot's barking she found an answer to her thoughts, and probably he
attracted her in the same way as Stepan's abuse. At home some piece of
news would await her, such, for instance, as that the geese from the
village had ruined our cabbage in the garden, or that Larion had stolen
the reins; and shrugging her shoulders, she would say with a laugh:
"What do you expect of these people?"