Elena Ivanovna and her little daughter visited the village on foot. They
were out for a walk. It was a Sunday, and the peasant women and girls
were walking up and down the street in their brightly-coloured dresses.
Rodion and Stepanida, sitting side by side at their door, bowed and
smiled to Elena Ivanovna and her little daughter as to acquaintances.
From the windows more than a dozen children stared at them; their faces
expressed amazement and curiosity, and they could be heard whispering:
“The Kutcherov lady has come! The Kutcherov lady!”
“Good-morning,” said Elena Ivanovna, and she stopped; she paused, and
then asked: “Well, how are you getting on?”
“We get along all right, thank God,” answered Rodion, speaking rapidly.
“To be sure we get along.”
“The life we lead!” smiled Stepanida. “You can see our poverty
yourself, dear lady! The family is fourteen souls in all, and only two
bread-winners. We are supposed to be blacksmiths, but when they bring us
a horse to shoe we have no coal, nothing to buy it with. We are worried
to death, lady,” she went on, and laughed. “Oh, oh, we are worried to
death.”
Elena Ivanovna sat down at the entrance and, putting her arm round her
little girl, pondered something, and judging from the little girl’s
expression, melancholy thoughts were straying through her mind, too; as
she brooded she played with the sumptuous lace on the parasol she had
taken out of her mother’s hands.
“Poverty,” said Rodion, “a great deal of anxiety--you see no end to it.
Here, God sends no rain... our life is not easy, there is no denying
it.”
“You have a hard time in this life,” said Elena Ivanovna, “but in the
other world you will be happy.”
Rodion did not understand her, and simply coughed into his clenched hand
by way of reply. Stepanida said:
“Dear lady, the rich men will be all right in the next world, too. The
rich put up candles, pay for services; the rich give to beggars, but
what can the poor man do? He has no time to make the sign of the cross.
He is the beggar of beggars himself; how can he think of his soul? And
many sins come from poverty; from trouble we snarl at one another like
dogs, we haven’t a good word to say to one another, and all sorts of
things happen, dear lady--God forbid! It seems we have no luck in this
world nor the next. All the luck has fallen to the rich.”
She spoke gaily; she was evidently used to talking of her hard life. And
Rodion smiled, too; he was pleased that his old woman was so clever, so
ready of speech.
“It is only on the surface that the rich seem to be happy,” said Elena
Ivanovna. “Every man has his sorrow. Here my husband and I do not live
poorly, we have means, but are we happy? I am young, but I have had
four children; my children are always being ill. I am ill, too, and
constantly being doctored.”
“And what is your illness?” asked Rodion.
“A woman’s complaint. I get no sleep; a continual headache gives me no
peace. Here I am sitting and talking, but my head is bad, I am weak all
over, and I should prefer the hardest labour to such a condition. My
soul, too, is troubled; I am in continual fear for my children, my
husband. Every family has its own trouble of some sort; we have ours.
I am not of noble birth. My grandfather was a simple peasant, my father
was a tradesman in Moscow; he was a plain, uneducated man, too, while my
husband’s parents were wealthy and distinguished. They did not want him
to marry me, but he disobeyed them, quarrelled with them, and they have
not forgiven us to this day. That worries my husband; it troubles him
and keeps him in constant agitation; he loves his mother, loves her
dearly. So I am uneasy, too, my soul is in pain.”
Peasants, men and women, were by now standing round Rodion’s hut and
listening. Kozov came up, too, and stood twitching his long, narrow
beard. The Lytchkovs, father and son, drew near.
“And say what you like, one cannot be happy and satisfied if one does
not feel in one’s proper place.” Elena Ivanovna went on. “Each of you
has his strip of land, each of you works and knows what he is working
for; my husband builds bridges--in short, everyone has his place, while
I, I simply walk about. I have not my bit to work. I don’t work, and
feel as though I were an outsider. I am saying all this that you may not
judge from outward appearances; if a man is expensively dressed and has
means it does not prove that he is satisfied with his life.”
She got up to go away and took her daughter by the hand.
“I like your place here very much,” she said, and smiled, and from that
faint, diffident smile one could tell how unwell she really was, how
young and how pretty; she had a pale, thinnish face with dark eyebrows
and fair hair. And the little girl was just such another as her mother:
thin, fair, and slender. There was a fragrance of scent about them.
“I like the river and the forest and the village,” Elena Ivanovna went
on; “I could live here all my life, and I feel as though here I
should get strong and find my place. I want to help you--I want to
dreadfully--to be of use, to be a real friend to you. I know your need,
and what I don’t know I feel, my heart guesses. I am sick, feeble, and
for me perhaps it is not possible to change my life as I would. But I
have children. I will try to bring them up that they may be of use to
you, may love you. I shall impress upon them continually that their life
does not belong to them, but to you. Only I beg you earnestly, I beseech
you, trust us, live in friendship with us. My husband is a kind, good
man. Don’t worry him, don’t irritate him. He is sensitive to every
trifle, and yesterday, for instance, your cattle were in our vegetable
garden, and one of your people broke down the fence to the bee-hives,
and such an attitude to us drives my husband to despair. I beg you,”
she went on in an imploring voice, and she clasped her hands on her
bosom--“I beg you to treat us as good neighbours; let us live in peace!
There is a saying, you know, that even a bad peace is better than a
good quarrel, and, ‘Don’t buy property, but buy neighbours.’ I repeat
my husband is a kind man and good; if all goes well we promise to do
everything in our power for you; we will mend the roads, we will build a
school for your children. I promise you.”
“Of course we thank you humbly, lady,” said Lytchkov the father, looking
at the ground; “you are educated people; it is for you to know best.
Only, you see, Voronov, a rich peasant at Eresnevo, promised to build
a school; he, too, said, ‘I will do this for you,’ ‘I will do that for
you,’ and he only put up the framework and refused to go on. And then
they made the peasants put the roof on and finish it; it cost them a
thousand roubles. Voronov did not care; he only stroked his beard, but
the peasants felt it a bit hard.”
“That was a crow, but now there’s a rook, too,” said Kozov, and he
winked.
There was the sound of laughter.
“We don’t want a school,” said Volodka sullenly. “Our children go to
Petrovskoe, and they can go on going there; we don’t want it.”
Elena Ivanovna seemed suddenly intimidated; her face looked paler and
thinner, she shrank into herself as though she had been touched with
something coarse, and walked away without uttering another word. And she
walked more and more quickly, without looking round.
“Lady,” said Rodion, walking after her, “lady, wait a bit; hear what I
would say to you.”
He followed her without his cap, and spoke softly as though begging.
“Lady, wait and hear what I will say to you.”
They had walked out of the village, and Elena Ivanovna stopped beside a
cart in the shade of an old mountain ash.
“Don’t be offended, lady,” said Rodion. “What does it mean? Have
patience. Have patience for a couple of years. You will live here, you
will have patience, and it will all come round. Our folks are good and
peaceable; there’s no harm in them; it’s God’s truth I’m telling you.
Don’t mind Kozov and the Lytchkovs, and don’t mind Volodka. He’s a fool;
he listens to the first that speaks. The others are quiet folks; they
are silent. Some would be glad, you know, to say a word from the heart
and to stand up for themselves, but cannot. They have a heart and a
conscience, but no tongue. Don’t be offended... have patience.... What
does it matter?”
Elena Ivanovna looked at the broad, tranquil river, pondering, and
tears flowed down her cheeks. And Rodion was troubled by those tears; he
almost cried himself.
“Never mind...” he muttered. “Have patience for a couple of years. You
can have the school, you can have the roads, only not all at once. If
you went, let us say, to sow corn on that mound you would first have to
weed it out, to pick out all the stones, and then to plough, and work
and work... and with the people, you see, it is the same... you must
work and work until you overcome them.”
The crowd had moved away from Rodion’s hut, and was coming along the
street towards the mountain ash. They began singing songs and playing
the concertina, and they kept coming closer and closer....
“Mamma, let us go away from here,” said the little girl, huddling up to
her mother, pale and shaking all over; “let us go away, mamma!
“Where?”
“To Moscow.... Let us go, mamma.”
The child began crying.
Rodion was utterly overcome; his face broke into profuse perspiration;
he took out of his pocket a little crooked cucumber, like a half-moon,
covered with crumbs of rye bread, and began thrusting it into the little
girl’s hands.
“Come, come,” he muttered, scowling severely; “take the little cucumber,
eat it up.... You mustn’t cry. Mamma will whip you.... She’ll tell your
father of you when you get home. Come, come....”
They walked on, and he still followed behind them, wanting to say
something friendly and persuasive to them. And seeing that they were
both absorbed in their own thoughts and their own griefs, and not
noticing him, he stopped and, shading his eyes from the sun, looked
after them for a long time till they disappeared into their copse.