Auntie Dasha looked after the estate. Tightly laced, with jingling
bracelets on her wrists, she went into the kitchen, the granary,
the cattle-yard, tripping along with tiny steps, wriggling her
spine; and whenever she talked to the steward or to the peasants,
she used, for some reason, to put on a pince-nez. Vera's grandfather
always sat in the same place, playing patience or dozing. He ate a
very great deal at dinner and supper; they gave him the dinner
cooked to-day and what was left from yesterday, and cold pie left
from Sunday, and salt meat from the servants' dinner, and he ate
it all greedily. And every dinner left on Vera such an impression,
that when she saw afterwards a flock of sheep driven by, or flour
being brought from the mill, she thought, "Grandfather will eat
that." For the most part he was silent, absorbed in eating or in
patience; but it sometimes happened at dinner that at the sight of
Vera he would be touched and say tenderly:
"My only grandchild! Verotchka!"
And tears would glisten in his eyes. Or his face would turn suddenly
crimson, his neck would swell, he would look with fury at the
servants, and ask, tapping with his stick:
"Why haven't you brought the horse-radish?"
In winter he led a perfectly inactive existence; in summer he
sometimes drove out into the fields to look at the oats and the
hay; and when he came back he would flourish his stick and declare
that everything was neglected now that he was not there to look
after it.
"Your grandfather is out of humour," Auntie Dasha would whisper.
"But it's nothing now to what it used to be in the old days:
'Twenty-five strokes! The birch!'"
Her aunt complained that every one had grown lazy, that no one did
anything, and that the estate yielded no profit. Indeed, there was
no systematic farming; they ploughed and sowed a little simply from
habit, and in reality did nothing and lived in idleness. Meanwhile
there was a running to and fro, reckoning and worrying all day long;
the bustle in the house began at five o'clock in the morning; there
were continual sounds of "Bring it," "Fetch it," "Make haste," and
by the evening the servants were utterly exhausted. Auntie Dasha
changed her cooks and her housemaids every week; sometimes she
discharged them for immorality; sometimes they went of their own
accord, complaining that they were worked to death. None of the
village people would come to the house as servants; Auntie Dasha
had to hire them from a distance. There was only one girl from the
village living in the house, Alyona, and she stayed because her
whole family--old people and children--were living upon her
wages. This Alyona, a pale, rather stupid little thing, spent the
whole day turning out the rooms, waiting at table, heating the
stoves, sewing, washing; but it always seemed as though she were
only pottering about, treading heavily with her boots, and were
nothing but a hindrance in the house. In her terror that she might
be dismissed and sent home, she often dropped and broke the crockery,
and they stopped the value of it out of her wages, and then her
mother and grandmother would come and bow down at Auntie Dasha's
feet.
Once a week or sometimes oftener visitors would arrive. Her aunt
would come to Vera and say:
"You should sit a little with the visitors, or else they'll think
that you are stuck up."
Vera would go in to the visitors and play _vint_ with them for hours
together, or play the piano for the visitors to dance; her aunt,
in high spirits and breathless from dancing, would come up and
whisper to her:
"Be nice to Marya Nikiforovna."
On the sixth of December, St. Nikolay's Day, a large party of about
thirty arrived all at once; they played _vint_ until late at night,
and many of them stayed the night. In the morning they sat down to
cards again, then they had dinner, and when Vera went to her room
after dinner to rest from conversation and tobacco smoke, there
were visitors there too, and she almost wept in despair. And when
they began to get ready to go in the evening, she was so pleased
they were going at last, that she said:
"Do stay a little longer."
She felt exhausted by the visitors and constrained by their presence;
yet every day, as soon as it began to grow dark, something drew her
out of the house, and she went out to pay visits either at the works
or at some neighbours', and then there were cards, dancing, forfeits,
suppers. . . .The young people in the works or in the mines sometimes
sang Little Russian songs, and sang them very well. It made one sad
to hear them sing. Or they all gathered together in one room and
talked in the dusk of the mines, of the treasures that had once
been buried in the steppes, of Saur's Grave. . . . Later on, as
they talked, a shout of "Help!" sometimes reached them. It was a
drunken man going home, or some one was being robbed by the pit
near by. Or the wind howled in the chimneys, the shutters banged;
then, soon afterwards, they would hear the uneasy church bell, as
the snow-storm began.
At all the evening parties, picnics, and dinners, Auntie Dasha was
invariably the most interesting woman and the doctor the most
interesting man. There was very little reading either at the works
or at the country-houses; they played only marches and polkas; and
the young people always argued hotly about things they did not
understand, and the effect was crude. The discussions were loud and
heated, but, strange to say, Vera had nowhere else met people so
indifferent and careless as these. They seemed to have no fatherland,
no religion, no public interests. When they talked of literature
or debated some abstract question, it could be seen from Dr.
Neshtchapov's face that the question had no interest for him whatever,
and that for long, long years he had read nothing and cared to read
nothing. Serious and expressionless, like a badly painted portrait,
for ever in his white waistcoat, he was silent and incomprehensible
as before; but the ladies, young and old, thought him interesting
and were enthusiastic over his manners. They envied Vera, who
appeared to attract him very much. And Vera always came away from
the visits with a feeling of vexation, vowing inwardly to remain
at home; but the day passed, the evening came, and she hurried off
to the works again, and it was like that almost all the winter.
She ordered books and magazines, and used to read them in her room.
And she read at night, lying in bed. When the clock in the corridor
struck two or three, and her temples were beginning to ache from
reading, she sat up in bed and thought, "What am I to do? Where am
I to go?" Accursed, importunate question, to which there were a
number of ready-made answers, and in reality no answer at all.
Oh, how noble, how holy, how picturesque it must be to serve the
people, to alleviate their sufferings, to enlighten them! But she,
Vera, did not know the people. And how could she go to them? They
were strange and uninteresting to her; she could not endure the
stuffy smell of the huts, the pot-house oaths, the unwashed children,
the women's talk of illnesses. To walk over the snow-drifts, to
feel cold, then to sit in a stifling hut, to teach children she
disliked--no, she would rather die! And to teach the peasants'
children while Auntie Dasha made money out of the pot-houses and
fined the peasants--it was too great a farce! What a lot of talk
there was of schools, of village libraries, of universal education;
but if all these engineers, these mine-owners and ladies of her
acquaintance, had not been hypocrites, and really had believed that
enlightenment was necessary, they would not have paid the schoolmasters
fifteen roubles a month as they did now, and would not have let
them go hungry. And the schools and the talk about ignorance--it
was all only to stifle the voice of conscience because they were
ashamed to own fifteen or thirty thousand acres and to be indifferent
to the peasants' lot. Here the ladies said about Dr. Neshtchapov
that he was a kind man and had built a school at the works. Yes,
he had built a school out of the old bricks at the works for some
eight hundred roubles, and they sang the prayer for "long life" to
him when the building was opened, but there was no chance of his
giving up his shares, and it certainly never entered his head that
the peasants were human beings like himself, and that they, too,
needed university teaching, and not merely lessons in these wretched
schools.
And Vera felt full of anger against herself and every one else. She
took up a book again and tried to read it, but soon afterwards sat
down and thought again. To become a doctor? But to do that one must
pass an examination in Latin; besides, she had an invincible
repugnance to corpses and disease. It would be nice to become a
mechanic, a judge, a commander of a steamer, a scientist; to do
something into which she could put all her powers, physical and
spiritual, and to be tired out and sleep soundly at night; to give
up her life to something that would make her an interesting person,
able to attract interesting people, to love, to have a real family
of her own. . . . But what was she to do? How was she to begin?
One Sunday in Lent her aunt came into her room early in the morning
to fetch her umbrella. Vera was sitting up in bed clasping her head
in her hands, thinking.
"You ought to go to church, darling," said her aunt, "or people
will think you are not a believer."
Vera made no answer.
"I see you are dull, poor child," said Auntie Dasha, sinking on her
knees by the bedside; she adored Vera. "Tell me the truth, are you
bored?"
"Dreadfully."
"My beauty, my queen, I am your willing slave, I wish you nothing
but good and happiness. . . . Tell me, why don't you want to marry
Nestchapov? What more do you want, my child? You must forgive me,
darling; you can't pick and choose like this, we are not princes
. . . . Time is passing, you are not seventeen. . . . And I don't
understand it! He loves you, idolises you!"
"Oh, mercy!" said Vera with vexation. "How can I tell? He sits dumb
and never says a word."
"He's shy, darling. . . . He's afraid you'll refuse him!"
And when her aunt had gone away, Vera remained standing in the
middle of her room uncertain whether to dress or to go back to bed.
The bed was hateful; if one looked out of the window there were the
bare trees, the grey snow, the hateful jackdaws, the pigs that her
grandfather would eat. . . .
"Yes, after all, perhaps I'd better get married!" she thought.