The arrival of the visitors was already known in the village, and
directly after mass a number of people gathered together in the hut. The
Leonytchevs and Matvyeitchevs and the Ilyitchovs came to inquire about
their relations who were in service in Moscow. All the lads of Zhukovo
who could read and write were packed off to Moscow and hired out as
butlers or waiters (while from the village on the other side of the
river the boys all became bakers), and that had been the custom from the
days of serfdom long ago when a certain Luka Ivanitch, a peasant from
Zhukovo, now a legendary figure, who had been a waiter in one of the
Moscow clubs, would take none but his fellow-villagers into his service,
and found jobs for them in taverns and restaurants; and from that time
the village of Zhukovo was always called among the inhabitants of the
surrounding districts Slaveytown. Nikolay had been taken to Moscow when
he was eleven, and Ivan Makaritch, one of the Matvyeitchevs, at
that time a headwaiter in the “Hermitage” garden, had put him into
a situation. And now, addressing the Matvyeitchevs, Nikolay said
emphatically:
“Ivan Makaritch was my benefactor, and I am bound to pray for him day
and night, as it is owing to him I have become a good man.”
“My good soul!” a tall old woman, the sister of Ivan Makaritch, said
tearfully, “and not a word have we heard about him, poor dear.”
“In the winter he was in service at Omon’s, and this season there was a
rumour he was somewhere out of town, in gardens.... He has aged! In
old days he would bring home as much as ten roubles a day in the
summer-time, but now things are very quiet everywhere. The old man
frets.”
The women looked at Nikolay’s feet, shod in felt boots, and at his pale
face, and said mournfully:
“You are not one to get on, Nikolay Osipitch; you are not one to get on!
No, indeed!”
And they all made much of Sasha. She was ten years old, but she was
little and very thin, and might have been taken for no more than seven.
Among the other little girls, with their sunburnt faces and roughly
cropped hair, dressed in long faded smocks, she with her white little
face, with her big dark eyes, with a red ribbon in her hair, looked
funny, as though she were some little wild creature that had been caught
and brought into the hut.
“She can read, too,” Olga said in her praise, looking tenderly at her
daughter. “Read a little, child!” she said, taking the gospel from the
corner. “You read, and the good Christian people will listen.”
The testament was an old and heavy one in leather binding, with
dog’s-eared edges, and it exhaled a smell as though monks had come into
the hut. Sasha raised her eyebrows and began in a loud rhythmic chant:
“‘And the angel of the Lord... appeared unto Joseph, saying unto him:
Rise up, and take the Babe and His mother.’”
“The Babe and His mother,” Olga repeated, and flushed all over with
emotion.
“‘And flee into Egypt,... and tarry there until such time as...’”
At the word “tarry” Olga could not refrain from tears. Looking at her,
Marya began to whimper, and after her Ivan Makaritch’s sister. The old
father cleared his throat, and bustled about to find something to give
his grand-daughter, but, finding nothing, gave it up with a wave of his
hand. And when the reading was over the neighbours dispersed to their
homes, feeling touched and very much pleased with Olga and Sasha.
As it was a holiday, the family spent the whole day at home. The old
woman, whom her husband, her daughters-in-law, her grandchildren all
alike called Granny, tried to do everything herself; she heated the
stove and set the samovar with her own hands, even waited at the midday
meal, and then complained that she was worn out with work. And all the
time she was uneasy for fear someone should eat a piece too much, or
that her husband and daughters-in-law would sit idle. At one time she
would hear the tavern-keeper’s geese going at the back of the huts to
her kitchen-garden, and she would run out of the hut with a long stick
and spend half an hour screaming shrilly by her cabbages, which were as
gaunt and scraggy as herself; at another time she fancied that a crow
had designs on her chickens, and she rushed to attack it wi th loud
words of abuse. She was cross and grumbling from morning till night. And
often she raised such an outcry that passers-by stopped in the street.
She was not affectionate towards the old man, reviling him as a
lazy-bones and a plague. He was not a responsible, reliable peasant, and
perhaps if she had not been continually nagging at him he would not have
worked at all, but would have simply sat on the stove and talked.
He talked to his son at great length about certain enemies of his,
complained of the insults he said he had to put up with every day from
the neighbours, and it was tedious to listen to him.
“Yes,” he would say, standing with his arms akimbo, “yes.... A week
after the Exaltation of the Cross I sold my hay willingly at thirty
kopecks a pood.... Well and good.... So you see I was taking the hay
in the morning with a good will; I was interfering with no one. In an
unlucky hour I see the village elder, Antip Syedelnikov, coming out of
the tavern. ‘Where are you taking it, you ruffian?’ says he, and takes
me by the ear.”
Kiryak had a fearful headache after his drinking bout, and was ashamed
to face his brother.
“What vodka does! Ah, my God!” he muttered, shaking his aching head.
“For Christ’s sake, forgive me, brother and sister; I’m not happy
myself.”
As it was a holiday, they bought a herring at the tavern and made a soup
of the herring’s head. At midday they all sat down to drink tea, and
went on drinking it for a long time, till they were all perspiring;
they looked positively swollen from the tea-drinking, and after it began
sipping the broth from the herring’s head, all helping themselves out of
one bowl. But the herring itself Granny had hidden.
In the evening a potter began firing pots on the ravine. In the meadow
below the girls got up a choral dance and sang songs. They played the
concertina. And on the other side of the river a kiln for baking pots
was lighted, too, and the girls sang songs, and in the distance the
singing sounded soft and musical. The peasants were noisy in and about
the tavern. They were singing with drunken voices, each on his own
account, and swearing at one another, so that Olga could only shudder
and say:
“Oh, holy Saints!”
She was amazed that the abuse was incessant, and those who were loudest
and most persistent in this foul language were the old men who were so
near their end. And the girls and children heard the swearing, and were
not in the least disturbed by it, and it was evident that they were used
to it from their cradles.
It was past midnight, the kilns on both sides of the river were put out,
but in the meadow below and in the tavern the merrymaking still went on.
The old father and Kiryak, both drunk, walking arm-in-arm and jostling
against each other’s shoulders, went to the barn where Olga and Marya
were lying.
“Let her alone,” the old man persuaded him; “let her alone.... She is a
harmless woman.... It’s a sin....”
“Ma-arya!” shouted Kiryak.
“Let her be.... It’s a sin.... She is not a bad woman.”
Both stopped by the barn and went on.
“I lo-ove the flowers of the fi-ield,” the old man began singing
suddenly in a high, piercing tenor. “I lo-ove to gather them in the
meadows!”
Then he spat, and with a filthy oath went into the hut.