street, or working, or talking to my mates, I thought all the time of
going to Maria Victorovna's in the evening, and always had her voice,
her laughter, her movements with me. And always as I got ready to go to
her, I would stand for a long time in front of the cracked mirror tying
my necktie; my serge suit seemed horrible to me, and I suffered, but at
the same time, despised myself for feeling so small. When she called to
me from another room to say that she was not dressed yet and to ask me
to wait a bit, and I could hear her dressing, I was agitated and felt as
though the floor was sinking under me. And when I saw a woman in the
street, even at a distance, I fell to comparing her figure with hers,
and it seemed to me that all our women and girls were vulgar, absurdly
dressed, and without manners; and such comparisons roused in me a
feeling of pride; Maria Victorovna was better than all of them. And at
night I dreamed of her and myself.
Once at supper the engineer and I ate a whole lobster. When I reached
home I remember that the engineer had twice called me "my dear fellow,"
and I thought that they treated me as they might have done a big,
unhappy dog, separated from his master, and that they were amusing
themselves with me, and that they would order me away like a dog when
they were bored with me. I began to feel ashamed and hurt; went to the
point of tears, as though I had been insulted, and, raising my eyes to
the heavens, I vowed to put an end to it all.
Next day I did not go to the Dolyhikovs'. Late at night, when it was
quite dark and pouring with rain, I walked up and down Great Gentry
Street, looking at the windows. At the Azhoguins' everybody was asleep
and the only light was in one of the top windows; old Mrs. Azhoguin was
sitting in her room embroidering by candle-light and imagining herself
to be fighting against prejudice. It was dark in our house and opposite,
at the Dolyhikovs' the windows were lit up, but it was impossible to see
anything through the flowers and curtains. I kept on walking up and down
the street; I was soaked through with the cold March rain. I heard my
father come home from the club; he knocked at the door; in a minute a
light appeared at a window and I saw my sister walking quickly with her
lamp and hurriedly arranging her thick hair. Then my father paced up and
down the drawing-room, talking and rubbing his hands, and my sister sat
still in a corner, lost in thought, not listening to him....
But soon they left the room and the light was put out.... I looked at
the engineer's house and that too was now dark. In the darkness and the
rain I felt desperately lonely. Cast out at the mercy of Fate, and I
felt how, compared with my loneliness, and my suffering, actual and to
come, all my work and all my desires and all that I had hitherto thought
and read, were vain and futile. Alas! The activities and thoughts of
human beings are not nearly so important as their sorrows! And not
knowing exactly what I was doing I pulled with all my might at the bell
at the Dolyhikovs' gate, broke it, and ran away down the street like a
little boy, full of fear, thinking they would rush out at once and
recognise me. When I stopped to take breath at the end of the street, I
could hear nothing but the falling rain and far away a night-watchman
knocking on a sheet of iron.
For a whole week I did not go to the Dolyhikovs'. I sold my serge suit.
I had no work and I was once more half-starved, earning ten or twenty
copecks a day, when possible, by disagreeable work. Floundering knee-
deep in the mire, putting out all my strength, I tried to drown my
memories and to punish myself for all the cheeses and pickles to which I
had been treated at the engineer's. Still, no sooner did I go to bed,
wet and hungry, than my untamed imagination set to work to evolve
wonderful, alluring pictures, and to my amazement I confessed that I was
in love, passionately in love, and I fell sound asleep feeling that the
hard life had only made my body stronger and younger.
One evening it began, most unseasonably, to snow, and the wind blew from
the north, exactly as if winter had begun again. When I got home from
work I found Maria Victorovna in my room. She was in her furs with her
hands in her muff.
"Why don't you come to see me?" she asked, looking at me with her bright
sagacious eyes, and I was overcome with joy and stood stiffly in front
of her, just as I had done with my father when he was going to thrash
me; she looked straight into my face and I could see by her eyes that
she understood why I was overcome.
"Why don't you come to see me?" she repeated. "You don't want to come? I
had to come to you."
She got up and came close to me.
"Don't leave me," she said, and her eyes filled with tears. "I am
lonely, utterly lonely."
She began to cry and said, covering her face with her muff:
"Alone! Life is hard, very hard, and in the whole world I have no one
but you. Don't leave me!"
Looking for her handkerchief to dry her tears, she gave a smile; we were
silent for some time, then I embraced and kissed her, and the pin in her
hat scratched my face and drew blood.
And we began to talk as though we had been dear to each other for a
long, long time.
X
In a couple of days she sent me to Dubechnia and I was beyond words
delighted with it. As I walked to the station, and as I sat in the
train, I laughed for no reason and people thought me drunk. There were
snow and frost in the mornings still, but the roads were getting dark,
and there were rooks cawing above them.
At first I thought of arranging the side wing opposite Mrs. Cheprakov's
for myself and Masha, but it appeared that doves and pigeons had taken
up their abode there and it would be impossible to cleanse it without
destroying a great number of nests. We would have to live willy-nilly in
the uncomfortable rooms with Venetian blinds in the big house. The
peasants called it a palace; there were more than twenty rooms in it,
and the only furniture was a piano and a child's chair, lying in the
attic, and even if Masha brought all her furniture from town we should
not succeed in removing the impression of frigid emptiness and coldness.
I chose three small rooms with windows looking on to the garden, and
from early morning till late at night I was at work in them, glazing the
windows, hanging paper, blocking up the chinks and holes in the floor.
It was an easy, pleasant job. Every now and then I would run to the
river to see if the ice was breaking and all the while I dreamed of the
starlings returning. And at night when I thought of Masha I would be
filled with an inexpressibly sweet feeling of an all-embracing joy to
listen to the rats and the wind rattling and knocking above the ceiling;
it was like an old hobgoblin coughing in the attic.
The snow was deep; there was a heavy fall at the end of March, but it
thawed rapidly, as if by magic, and the spring floods rushed down so
that by the beginning of April the starlings were already chattering and
yellow butterflies fluttered in the garden. The weather was wonderful.
Every day toward evening I walked toward the town to meet Masha, and how
delightful it was to walk along the soft, drying road with bare feet!
Half-way I would sit down and look at the town, not daring to go nearer.
The sight of it upset me, I was always wondering how my acquaintances
would behave toward me when they heard of my love. What would my father
say? I was particularly worried by the idea that my life was becoming
more complicated, and that I had entirely lost control of it, and that
she was carrying me off like a balloon, God knows whither. I had already
given up thinking how to make a living, and I thought--indeed, I cannot
remember what I thought.
Masha used to come in a carriage. I would take a seat beside her and
together, happy and free, we used to drive to Dubechnia. Or, having
waited till sunset, I would return home, weary and disconsolate,
wondering why Masha had not come, and then by the gate or in the garden
I would find my darling. She would come by the railway and walk over
from the station. What a triumph she had then! In her plain, woollen
dress, with a simple umbrella, but keeping a trim, fashionable figure
and expensive, Parisian boots--she was a gifted actress playing the
country girl. We used to go over the house, and plan out the rooms, and
the paths, and the vegetable-garden, and the beehives. We already had
chickens and ducks and geese which we loved because they were ours. We
had oats, clover, buckwheat, and vegetable seeds all ready for sowing,
and we used to examine them all and wonder what the crops would be like,
and everything Masha said to me seemed extraordinarily clever and fine.
This was the happiest time of my life.
Soon after Easter we were married in the parish church in the village of
Kurilovka three miles from Dubechnia. Masha wanted everything to be
simple; by her wish our bridesmen were peasant boys, only one deacon
sang, and we returned from the church in a little, shaky cart which she
drove herself. My sister was the only guest from the town. Masha had
sent her a note a couple of days before the wedding. My sister wore a
white dress and white gloves.... During the ceremony she cried softly
for joy and emotion, and her face had a maternal expression of infinite
goodness. She was intoxicated with our happiness and smiled as though
she were breathing a sweet perfume, and when I looked at her I
understood that there was nothing in the world higher in her eyes than
love, earthly love, and that she was always dreaming of love, secretly,
timidly, yet passionately. She embraced Masha and kissed her, and, not
knowing how to express her ecstasy, she said to her of me:
"He is a good man! A very good man."
Before she left us, she put on her ordinary clothes, and took me into
the garden to have a quiet talk.
"Father is very hurt that you have not written to him," she said. "You
should have asked for his blessing. But, at heart, he is very pleased.
He says that this marriage will raise you in the eyes of society, and
that under Maria Victorovna's influence you will begin to adopt a more
serious attitude toward life. In the evening now we talk about nothing
but you; and yesterday he even said, 'our Misail.' I was delighted. He
has evidently thought of a plan and I believe he wants to set you an
example of magnanimity, and that he will be the first to talk of
reconciliation. It is quite possible that one of these days he will come
and see you here."
She made the sign of the cross over me and said:
"Well, God bless you. Be happy. Aniuta Blagovo is a very clever girl.
She says of your marriage that God has sent you a new ordeal. Well?
Married life is not made up only of joy but of suffering as well. It is
impossible to avoid it."
Masha and I walked about three miles with her, and then walked home
quietly and silently, as though it were a rest for both of us. Masha had
her hand on my arm. We were at peace and there was no need to talk of
love; after the wedding we grew closer to each other and dearer, and it
seemed as though nothing could part us.
"Your sister is a dear, lovable creature," said Masha, "but looks as
though she had lived in torture. Your father must be a terrible man."
I began to tell her how my sister and I had been brought up and how
absurd and full of torture our childhood had been. When she heard that
my father had thrashed me quite recently she shuddered and clung to me:
"Don't tell me any more," she said. "It is too horrible."
And now she did not leave me. We lived in the big house, in three rooms,
and in the evenings we bolted the door that led to the empty part of the
house, as though some one lived there whom we did not know and feared. I
used to get up early, at dawn, and begin working. I repaired the carts;
made paths in the garden, dug the beds, painted the roofs. When the time
came to sow oats, I tried to plough and harrow, and sow and did it all
conscientiously, and did not leave it all to the labourer. I used to get
tired, and my face and feet used to burn with the rain and the sharp
cold wind. But work in the fields did not attract me. I knew nothing
about agriculture and did not like it; perhaps because my ancestors were
not tillers of the soil and pure town blood ran in my veins. I loved
nature dearly; I loved the fields and the meadows and the garden, but
the peasant who turns the earth with his plough, shouting at his
miserable horse, ragged and wet, with bowed shoulders, was to me an
expression of wild, rude, ugly force, and as I watched his clumsy
movements I could not help thinking of the long-passed legendary life,
when men did not yet know the use of fire. The fierce bull which led the
herd, and the horses that stampeded through the village, filled me with
terror, and all the large creatures, strong and hostile, a ram with
horns, a gander, or a watch-dog seemed to me to be symbolical of some
rough, wild force. These prejudices used to be particularly strong in me
in bad weather, when heavy clouds hung over the black plough-lands. But
worst of all was that when I was ploughing or sowing, and a few peasants
stood and watched how I did it, I no longer felt the inevitability and
necessity of the work and it seemed to me that I was trifling my time
away.
I used to go through the gardens and the meadow to the mill. It was
leased by Stiepan, a Kurilovka peasant; handsome, swarthy, with a black
beard--an athletic appearance. He did not care for mill work and thought
it tiresome and unprofitable, and he only lived at the mill to escape
from home. He was a saddler and always smelled of tan and leather. He
did not like talking, was slow and immovable, and used to hum "U-lu-lu-
lu," sitting on the bank or in the doorway of the mill. Sometimes his
wife and mother-in-law used to come from Kurilovka to see him; they were
both fair, languid, soft, and they used to bow to him humbly and call
him Stiepan Petrovich. And he would not answer their greeting with a
word or a sign, but would turn where he sat on the bank and hum quietly:
"U-lu-lu-lu." There would be a silence for an hour or two. His mother-
in-law and his wife would whisper to each other, get up and look
expectantly at him for some time, waiting for him to look at them, and
then they would bow humbly and say in sweet, soft voices:
"Good-bye, Stiepan Petrovich."
And they would go away. After that, Stiepan would put away the bundle of
cracknels or the shirt they had left for him and sigh and give a wink in
their direction and say:
"The female sex!"
The mill was worked with both wheels day and night. I used to help
Stiepan, I liked it, and when he went away I was glad to take his place.
XI
After a spell of warm bright weather we had a season of bad roads. It
rained and was cold all through May. The grinding of the millstones and
the drip of the rain induced idleness and sleep. The floor shook, the
whole place smelled of flour, and this too made one drowsy. My wife in a
short fur coat and high rubber boots used to appear twice a day and she
always said the same thing:
"Call this summer! It is worse than October!"
We used to have tea together and cook porridge, or sit together for
hours in silence thinking the rain would never stop. Once when Stiepan
went away to a fair, Masha stayed the night in the mill. When we got up
we could not tell what time it was for the sky was overcast; the sleepy
cocks at Dubechnia were crowing, and the corncrakes were trilling in the
meadow; it was very, very early.... My wife and I walked down to the
pool and drew up the bow-net that Stiepan had put out in our presence
the day before. There was one large perch in it and a crayfish angrily
stretched out his claws.
"Let them go," said Masha. "Let them be happy too."
Because we got up very early and had nothing to do, the day seemed very
long, the longest in my life. Stiepan returned before dusk and I went
back to the farmhouse.
"Your father came here to-day," said Masha.
"Where is he?"
"He has gone. I did not receive him."
Seeing my silence and feeling that I was sorry for my father, she said:
"We must be logical. I did not receive him and sent a message to ask him
not to trouble us again and not to come and see us."
In a moment I was outside the gates, striding toward the town to make it
up with my father. It was muddy, slippery, cold. For the first time
since our marriage I suddenly felt sad, and through my brain, tired with
the long day, there flashed the thought that perhaps I was not living as
I ought; I got more and more tired and was gradually overcome with
weakness, inertia; I had no desire to move or to think, and after
walking for some time, I waved my hand and went home.
In the middle of the yard stood the engineer in a leather coat with a
hood. He was shouting:
"Where's the furniture? There was some good Empire furniture, pictures,
vases. There's nothing left! Damn it, I bought the place with the
furniture!"
Near him stood Moissey, Mrs. Cheprakov's bailiff, fumbling with his cap;
a lank fellow of about twenty-five, with a spotty face and little,
impudent eyes; one side of his face was larger than the other as though
he had been lain on.
"Yes, Right Honourable Sir, you bought it without the furniture," he
said sheepishly. "I remember that clearly."
"Silence!" shouted the engineer, going red in the face, and beginning to
shake, and his shout echoed through the garden.
XII
When I was busy in the garden or the yard, Moissey would stand with his
hands behind his back and stare at me impertinently with his little
eyes. And this used to irritate me to such an extent that I would put
aside my work and go away.
We learned from Stiepan that Moissey had been Mrs. Cheprakov's lover. I
noticed that when people went to her for money they used to apply to
Moissey first, and once I saw a peasant, a charcoal-burner, black all
over, grovel at his feet. Sometimes after a whispered conversation
Moissey would hand over the money himself without saying anything to his
mistress, from which I concluded that the transaction was settled on his
own account.
He used to shoot in our garden, under our very windows, steal food from
our larder, borrow our horses without leave, and we were furious,
feeling that Dubechnia was no longer ours, and Masha used to go pale and
say:
"Have we to live another year and a half with these creatures?"
Ivan Cheprakov, the son, was a guard on the railway. During the winter
he got very thin and weak, so that he got drunk on one glass of vodka,
and felt cold out of the sun. He hated wearing his guard's uniform and
was ashamed of it, but found his job profitable because he could steal
candles and sell them. My new position gave him a mixed feeling of
astonishment, envy, and vague hope that something of the sort might
happen to him. He used to follow Masha with admiring eyes, and to ask me
what I had for dinner nowadays, and his ugly, emaciated face used to
wear a sweet, sad expression, and he used to twitch his fingers as
though he could feel my happiness with them.
"I say, Little Profit," he would say excitedly, lighting and relighting
his cigarette; he always made a mess wherever he stood because he used
to waste a whole box of matches on one cigarette. "I say, my life is
about as beastly as it could be. Every little squirt of a soldier can
shout: 'Here guard! Here!' I have such a lot in the trains and you know,
mine's a rotten life! My mother has ruined me! I heard a doctor say in
the train, if the parents are loose, their children become drunkards or
criminals. That's it."
Once he came staggering into the yard. His eyes wandered aimlessly and
he breathed heavily; he laughed and cried, and said something in a kind
of frenzy, and through his thickly uttered words I could only hear: "My
mother? Where is my mother?" and he wailed like a child crying, because
it has lost its mother in a crowd. I led him away into the garden and
laid him down under a tree, and all that day and through the night Masha
and I took it in turns to stay with him. He was sick and Masha looked
with disgust at his pale, wet face and said:
"Are we to have these creatures on the place for another year and a
half? It is awful! Awful!"
And what a lot of trouble the peasants gave us! How many disappointments
we had at the outset, in the spring, when we so longed to be happy! My
wife built a school. I designed the school for sixty boys, and the
Zemstvo Council approved the design, but recommended our building the
school at Kurilovka, the big village, only three miles away; besides the
Kurilovka school, where the children of four villages, including that of
Dubechnia, were taught, was old and inadequate and the floor was so
rotten that the children were afraid to walk on it. At the end of March
Masha, by her own desire, was appointed trustee of the Kurilovka school,
and at the beginning of April we called three parish meetings and
persuaded the peasants that the school was old and inadequate, and that
it was necessary to build a new one. A member of the Zemstvo Council and
the elementary school inspector came down too and addressed them. After
each meeting we were mobbed and asked for a pail of vodka; we felt
stifled in the crowd and soon got tired and returned home dissatisfied
and rather abashed. At last the peasants allotted a site for the school
and undertook to cart the materials from the town. And as soon as the
spring corn was sown, on the very first Sunday, carts set out from
Kurilovka and Dubechnia to fetch the bricks for the foundations. They
went at dawn and returned late in the evening. The peasants were drunk
and said they were tired out.
The rain and the cold continued, as though deliberately, all through
May. The roads were spoiled and deep in mud. When the carts came from
town they usually drove to our horror, into our yard! A horse would
appear in the gate, straddling its fore legs, with its big belly
heaving; before it came into the yard it would strain and heave and
after it would come a ten-yard beam in a four-wheeled wagon, wet and
slimy; alongside it, wrapped up to keep the rain out, never looking
where he was going and splashing through the puddles, a peasant would
walk with the skirt of his coat tucked up in his belt. Another cart
would appear with planks; then a third with a beam; then a fourth ...
and the yard in front of the house would gradually be blocked up with
horses, beams, planks. Peasants, men and women with their heads wrapped
up and their skirts tucked up, would stare morosely at our windows, kick
up a row and insist on the lady of the house coming out to them; and
they would curse and swear. And in a corner Moissey would stand, and it
seemed to us that he delighted in our discomfiture.
"We won't cart any more!" the peasants shouted. "We are tired to death!
Let her go and cart it herself!"
Pale and scared, thinking they would any minute break into the house,
Masha would send them money for a pail of vodka; after which the noise
would die down and the long beams would go jolting out of the yard.
When I went to look at the building my wife would get agitated and say:
"The peasants are furious. They might do something to you. No. Wait.
I'll go with you."
We used to drive over to Kurilovka together and then the carpenters
would ask for tips. The framework was ready for the foundations to be
laid, but the masons never came and when at last the masons did come it
was apparent that there was no sand; somehow it had been forgotten that
sand was wanted. Taking advantage of our helplessness, the peasants
asked thirty copecks a load, although it was less than a quarter of a
mile from the building to the river where the sand was to be fetched,
and more than five hundred loads were needed. There were endless
misunderstandings, wrangles, and continual begging. My wife was
indignant and the building contractor, Petrov, an old man of seventy,
took her by the hand and said:
"You look here! Look here! Just get me sand and I'll find ten men and
have the work done in two days. Look here!"
Sand was brought, but two, four days, a week passed and still there
yawned a ditch where the foundations were to be.
"I shall go mad," cried my wife furiously. "What wretches they are! What
wretches!"
During these disturbances Victor Ivanich used to come and see us. He
used to bring hampers of wine and dainties, and eat for a long time, and
then go to sleep on the terrace and snore so that the labourers shook
their heads and said:
"He's all right!"
Masha took no pleasure in his visits. She did not believe in him, and
yet she used to ask his advice; when, after a sound sleep after dinner,
he got up out of humour, and spoke disparagingly of our domestic
arrangements, and said he was sorry he had ever bought Dubechnia which
had cost him so much, and poor Masha looked miserably anxious and
complained to him, he would yawn and say the peasants ought to be
flogged.
He called our marriage and the life we were living a comedy, and used to
say it was a caprice, a whimsy.
"She did the same sort of thing once before," he told me. "She fancied
herself as an opera singer, and ran away from me. It took me two months
to find her, and my dear fellow, I wasted a thousand roubles on
telegrams alone."