PART THREE
THE estate at Durnovka was arranged after the plan of a farm. In fact, it had originally borne precisely that title. Durnovo had owned several estates and had occupied the chief of them, the one at Zusha. Afanasiy Ilitch, who had hunted the Gipsy with dogs, came only occasionally to Durnovka, on his way from a hunting expedition. Nil Afansaievitch, the Marshal of the Nobility, had no taste for farms: he had spent his whole life in organizing dinners, drinking sherry at his club, glorying in his fat, his appetite, his ringing whisper—he had a silver throat—in his lavishness, his witticisms, and his absence of mind. And his son, also, the Uhlan, who bore the name of his grandfather, rarely looked in at Durnovka. The Uhlan still considered himself a great landed proprietor. On retiring from the service he decided to accumulate millions, to show how an estate ought to be managed. But the Uhlan was not fond of being in the fields, and his passion for making purchases helped to ruin him: he bought almost everything his eye fell upon. His trips to Moscow and his amorous constitution likewise contributed to his ruin. His son, who did not finish at the Lyceum, received as his heritage only two farms—Laukhinoand Durnovka. And the Lyceum student ruined these to such a point that, during the last year he spent at Durnovka, the duties of watchman were discharged by an old scullery-maid, who went about at night with her mallet, garbed in a rusty raccoon cloak. “Well, never mind,” Kuzma said to himself, rejoiced to the verge of tears by Tikhon’s proposal, and profoundly concealing his joy. “If ’tis a farm, call it a farm! A good thing, too: ’tis a regular end-of-nowhere, savage as in the Tatar times!”
At one period Ilya Mironoff had lived in Durnovka for a couple of years. At the time Kuzma had been a mere child, and all he retained of it in his memory was, first, the fragrant hemp-fields, which drowned Durnovka, as it were, in a dark-green sea, and, secondly, one dark summer night. There had been not a single light in the village on that night. Past their cottage had filed, their chemises gleaming white in the darkness, “nine maidens, nine women, and the tenth a widow,” all barefoot, with hair flowing free, armed with brooms, oaken cudgels, and pitchforks. A deafening ringing of bells had arisen, and a thumping of oven-covers and frying pans, high above which soared a wild choral chant. The widow dragged a plough; alongside her walked a maiden carrying a large holy picture; while the rest rang bells, and thumped, and when the widow led off in a low tone,
“Thou cow-death,Enter not our village!”
“Thou cow-death,Enter not our village!”
“Thou cow-death,
Enter not our village!”
the chorus repeated in long-drawn tones, with funereal intonations:
“We plough—”
and mournfully, in throaty tones, took up the refrain,
“With incense, with the cross ...”
Now the aspect of the Durnovka fields was commonplace. The hemp plantations had vanished, and, even if they had not, the fields would have been bare in autumn, as well as the vegetable patches and the back yards. Kuzma set forth from Vorgol in a cheerful and slightly intoxicated state. Tikhon Ilitch had treated him to liqueur cordial at dinner, and at tea, after dinner, Nastasya Petrovna had treated him to two kinds of preserves. Tikhon Ilitch was very kindly disposed on that day. He recalled his youth, his childhood; how they had eaten buckwheat cakes together, how they had shouted “Tallyho!” after the Dog’s Pistol, and had studied with Byelkin; he called his wife “auntie” and ridiculed her trips to the nun Polukarpia for the good of her soul; he said, with regard to Kuzma’s salary: “We’ll square that, dear brother, we’ll make that right—I’ll not wrong you!” He referred briefly to the revolution: “That little bird started singing too early—look out, or the cat will eat it!” Kuzma rode a dark brown gelding, and around him lay outspread a sea of dark brown ploughed fields. The sun, almost like that of summer, the transparent air, the clear pale-blue sky, all gladdened himand gave promise of prolonged repose. The grey, crooked wormwood, turned up roots and all by the plough, was so plentiful that it was being carried off by the carload. Close to the farm itself, in the ploughed field, stood a wretched little nag, with burdocks in his forelock, and a springless cart, piled high with wormwood; and beside it lay Yakoff, bare-legged, in dusty breeches and a long hempen shirt, his side squeezed against a large grey dog which he was holding by the ear. The dog was growling and darting angry sidelong glances.
“Does he bite?” shouted Kuzma.
“He’s savage—there’s no taming him!” Yakoff made haste to reply, as he raised his slanting beard. “He jumps at the horses’ muzzles.”
And Kuzma burst out laughing with pleasure. The peasant was a regular peasant—and the steppe was a genuine steppe!
The road ran down a hill, and the horizon became narrower. In front the new iron roof of a grain-kiln gleamed green, seeming drowned in the dense low growths of the park. Beyond the park, on the opposite slope, stood a long row of cottages constructed of bricks moulded from clay, and roofed with straw. On the right, beyond the ploughed fields, stretched a large ravine, merging into the one which separated the farm from the village. At the point where the ravines came together, a pond lay sparkling in the sunlight. On the promontory between them the wings of two unsheathed windmills reared themselves aloft, surrounded by several cottages belonging to one-homestead owners—theMysoffs,[32]as Oska had dubbed them—and the whitewashed schoolhouse gleamed white on the pasture land.
“Well, and do the children get schooling?” inquired Kuzma.
“’Tis obligatory,” said Oska. “They have a scholar who is a terror!”
“What scholar are you talking about? Do you mean a teacher?”
“Well, then, teacher, it’s all the same. The way he has educated those brats—I tell you, ’tis fine. He’s a soldier. He beats them unmercifully, but on the other hand he has them well trained in all sorts of ways. Tikhon Ilitch and I happened to drop in one day—and if they didn’t all leap to their feet and bark out: ‘We wish you health!’ just as well as if they were soldiers!”
And once more Kuzma broke into a laugh.
But when he had passed the threshing-floor, had descended by the defective road past the cherry orchard and turned to the left, to the long farmyard, lying well dried and golden-hued in the sun, his heart actually began to beat violently. Here he was, at home, at last. And as he mounted the porch and stepped across the threshold, Kuzma gave vent to a sigh, and, making the sign of the cross on brow and breast, he bowed low before the dark holy picture in the corner of the ante-room....
And for a long time he cared not whether the Russian people had a future or not. He roamed about the manor estate, the village; he sat for hours at a time on the doorsteps of the cottages, on the threshing-floors—watching the inhabitants of Durnovka, enjoying the possibility of breathing pure air, of chatting with his new neighbours.
OPPOSITE the house, with their rear to Durnovka, to the wide ravine, stood the storehouses. From the porch, half of the village was visible, and beyond the storehouses the pond and a part of the promontory—one windmill and the schoolhouse. The sun rose to the left, beyond the fields, beyond the railway line on the horizon. In the morning the pond glittered with a bright, fresh exhalation, and from the park behind the house was wafted an odour of foliage from evergreens and leaf trees, steppe grass, apples, and dew. The rooms were small and empty. In the study, papered with old music sheets, rye was stored; in the hall and the drawing-room no furniture was left save a few Viennese chairs with broken seats and a large extension table. The windows of the drawing-room overlooked the park, and during almost the entire autumn Kuzma passed the night in it, on a broken-down couch, without closing the windows. The floor was never swept: the widow Odnodvorka lived theretemporarily, in the capacity of cook; she had been the mistress of young Durnovo, and was obliged to run after her small children and prepare food, after a fashion, for herself, Kuzma, and the labourer. Kuzma himself prepared the samovar in the morning, after which he sat at the window in the hall and drank tea and ate apples.
Through the early glitter, beyond the brilliant mist over the ploughed fields, the railway train dashed past in the morning; and, above, rose-coloured wreaths floated behind it. Dense smoke hung over the roofs of the village. The garden was freshly fragrant; silvery hoar-frost lay upon the storehouses. At noon the sun stood over the village; it was hot out of doors; in the park the maples and lindens grew thin, quietly dropping their leaves; the vast spaces and the transparent dry air of the fields were filled with silence and with peace. The doves, warmed up by the sun, dozed all day long on the sloping roof of the kitchen, whose new straw roof gleamed yellow against the clear blue sky. The labourer rested after his dinner. Odnodvorka went off to her own home.
But Kuzma roamed about. He went to the threshing-floor, rejoicing in the sun, the firm road, the withered steppe grass, the beet-tops which had turned dark brown, the charming late flower of the blue chicory, and the down of the cotton thistle floating quietly through the air. The ploughed spaces in the fields gleamed in the sunlight with the silken threads of barely visible spiders’ webs, which extended to an immense distance. In the vegetable garden,goldfinches perched on the dry stalks of the burdocks. Upon the threshing-floor, amid the profound stillness in the sultry heat, grasshoppers diligently emitted their hoarse cry.
From the threshing-floor Kuzma climbed across the earthen well and returned to the manor-house through the orchard and the fir plantation. In the orchard he chatted with the petty burghers, the lessees of the orchard, with the Bride and the Goat, who were gathering up the windfalls, and forced his way, in their company, into the nettle patch where lay the ripest fruit of all. Sometimes he wandered to the village, to the schoolhouse. He became freshened up, sunburned; he felt himself almost happy.
The Goat amazed him by her health, her cheery stupidity, her senselessly brilliant Egyptian eyes. The Bride was handsome and strange. With him, as with Tikhon, she remained silent; not a word was to be got out of her. But when one went away she gave vent to a harsh laugh, indulged in bawling conversations with the petty burghers, and would suddenly strike up:
“Let them thrash me, curse me—My pretty eyes will twinkle more ...”
“Let them thrash me, curse me—My pretty eyes will twinkle more ...”
“Let them thrash me, curse me—
My pretty eyes will twinkle more ...”
The soldier-teacher, born stupid, had lost in the service what small wits he had ever possessed. In appearance he was the most commonplace sort of peasant, about forty years of age. But he always spoke in such an extraordinary manner, and uttered suchnonsense, that all one could do was to throw up one’s hands in despair. He was for ever smiling with the greatest appearance of slyness at something or other; he looked down upon his interlocutor condescendingly, with his eyes screwed up, and never replied to any question immediately.
“How am I to address you?” Kuzma asked him the first time he visited the school.
The soldier blinked and considered the matter. “The sheep without a name might be a ram,” he said at last, at his leisure. “But I will ask you something also. Is Adam a name, or is it not?”
“It is.”
“Very well. And about how many people, for example, have died since then?”
“I don’t know,” said Kuzma. “Why do you inquire?”
“Simply because that’s one of the things we never were born to understand. Now, take any busybody you like. Do you indulge in revolt? Do it, my dear man: perhaps you will become afit-marshal! Only, at best, that they may stretch you out without your breeches for a flogging. Are you a peasant? Till the soil. Are you a cooper? In that case, equally, attend to your business. I, for example, am a soldier and a veterinary. Not long ago I was passing through the Fair, and what should I see but a horse with the glanders? I went at once to the policeman: ‘Thus and so,’ says I, ‘Your High Well-born.’ ‘But can you kill that horse with a feather?’ ‘With the greatest pleasure!’”
“With what sort of a feather?” inquired Kuzma.
“Why, a goose feather. I took it, sharpened it, jabbed it into his spinal cord, blew a little—into the feather, I mean—and the thing was done. ’Tis a simple matter, to all appearance, but just try to do it!” And the soldier winked craftily and tapped his brow with his finger: “Understanding is needed here.”
Kuzma shrugged his shoulders and made no reply. And as he passed Odnodvorka’s cottage he found out from her boy Senka what the soldier’s name was. It turned out to be Parmen.
“And what’s your task for to-morrow?” added Kuzma, gazing with curiosity at Senka’s fiery red mop of hair, his lively green eyes, his pock-marked face, his rickety little body, and his hands and feet all cracked with mud and chaps.
“The tasks are verses,” said Senka, grasping his uplifted foot in his right hand and hopping up and down on one spot.
“What sort of tasks?”
“Counting the geese. A flock of geese has flown past—”
“Ah, I know,” said Kuzma. “And what else?”
“Also mice—”
“They are to be counted too?”
“Yes. Six mice were walking along carrying six copper coins,” mumbled Senka rapidly, casting a sidelong glance at Kuzma’s silver watch chain. “One mouse, which was bigger, carried two coins. How many does that make in all—?”
“Splendid. And what are the verses?”
Senka released his foot.
“The verses are ‘Who is he?’”
“Have you learned them?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Well, then, say them.”
And Senka muttered still more rapidly about a horseman who was riding above the Neva through the forests, where there were only—
“‘Firs, pine-trees, and green moss....’”
“Grey,” said Kuzma, “not green.”
“Well, then, grey,” assented Senka.
“And who was that horseman?”
Senka considered the matter. “Why, a sorcerer,” said he.
“Exactly. Now, tell your mother that she ought to cut your hair, on your temples at least. ’Tis all the worse for you as it is, when the teacher pulls it.”
“Then he’ll find my ears,” said Senka unconcernedly, again grasping his foot, and off he hopped on the pasture common.
THE promontory and Durnovka lived in a state of perpetual enmity and mutual disdain, as adjoining villages always do. The promontory dwellers regarded the Durnovka folk in the light of bandits and beggars, while the Durnovka people returned the compliment precisely and in full measure.Durnovka was “gentry property,” while on the promontory dwelt “boors,” one-farm petty owners—more properly speaking, the remains of the one-farm people who had emigrated to the Tomsk Government. Odnodvorka was the only person who was not included in this enmity, these quarrels. Small, thin, dependable, she was lively, even-tempered, and agreeable in intercourse; and she was observant. She knew every family on the promontory and in Durnovka as well as if it were her own; she was the first to inform the manor-house of every smallest happening in the life of the village. And every one was also thoroughly well acquainted with her life.
She never concealed anything from anybody; she talked calmly and simply about her husband and Durnovo and stated that she had become a procuress when he went away. “What could I do?” she said, with a faint sigh. “I was dreadfully poor; I had not enough bread even after the new harvest. My good husband loved me, to speak the plain truth, but one has to submit, you know. The master gave three whole carloads of rye for me. ‘What can I do?’ I said to my husband. ’Twas plain, I must go, he said. He went for the rye, dragged home measure after measure, and his tears drip-dripped, drip-dripped all the while.”
And, after a moment’s thought, she added:
“Well, and later on, when the master went away, and my husband went to Rostoff, I began to bring people together, as chance occurred. You’re immoral dogs, the Lord forgive you!”
By day she toiled, never pausing for a moment; by night she mended, sewed, stole snow-screens from the railway. Once late at night, when Kuzma was driving to Tikhon Ilitch, he ascended a hillock and halted paralyzed with fright: across the ploughed land, half deluged in darkness, on a faintly smouldering strip of the sunset, something black, huge, sprang up and bore down smoothly on Kuzma.
“Who’s that?” he shouted feebly, tugging at his reins.
“Oï!” feebly and in affright shouted that which had so swiftly and smoothly sprung up against the sky; and it disappeared with a crash.
Kuzma recovered himself—and instantly recognized, in the darkness, Odnodvorka. She had been running toward him on her light, unshod feet, all bent together with the weight of two screens a fathom long—the sort that are set up, in winter, along the railway line, to protect it from snowdrifts. And, having rearranged herself, she whispered, with a quiet laugh:
“You frightened me to death. When one runs off somewhere of a night, one is all a-tremble, but what can one do? The whole village uses these for firewood, and that’s the only way we save ourselves from freezing.”
The farm-hand Koshel, on the other hand, was a man not devoid of interest. There was nothing one could talk about with him, and he was not loquacious by nature. Like the majority of the Durnovka people, he merely repeated antiquated, insignificant apophthegms, reasserted that which had been known formany a long year. If the weather turned bad he cast an eye at the sky: “The weather’s spoiling. Rain is what the growing green things most need at the present moment.” The fields were ploughed a second time, and he remarked: “If you won’t give a second ploughing you’ll be left without bread. That’s what the old people have always said.”
He had been a soldier in his day—had been in the Caucasus—but the military life had left no traces on him. He was unable to pronounce the word “post-office” properly: he called it “spost-office.” He could tell absolutely nothing whatsoever about the Caucasus, with the exception of the facts that mountain followed mountain there, and that terribly hot and strange waters spurted out of the ground. If you placed a piece of mutton in them, it was boiled in one minute, and if you didn’t take it out at the proper time, it got raw again. And he was not in the least proud of the fact that he had seen the world; he even bore himself with scorn toward people who knew the world. It is well understood that people only “rove about” because they are forced to do so, or through poverty. He never believed a single rumour—“all lies!”—but he did believe, and swore to it as a fact, that not long ago a witch had rolled in the form of a wheel through the twilight shades near Basovka, and that one peasant, who was no fool, had taken and caught hold of that wheel and thrust his belt through the hub and tied it fast.
“Well, and what happened next?” asked Kuzma.
“What?” replied Koshel. “That witch waked upearly in the morning, and, lo and behold, that belt was sticking out her mouth and behind, and was tied fast over her stomach.”
“But why didn’t she untie it?”
“Evidently, the knot had had the sign of the cross made over it.”
“And aren’t you ashamed to believe such nonsense?”
“What is there for me to be ashamed of? People lie, and I let them talk.”
So Kuzma only liked to hear the man’s songs. As he sat in the darkness at the open window, without a light anywhere, with the village barely discernible like a black spot on the other side of the ravine, it was so quiet round about that the apples could be heard falling from the wild apple trees beyond the corner of the house. And Koshel walked slowly about the farmyard with his mallet, and with a serene melancholy hummed to himself in his falsetto voice: “Cease your song, canary, little bird.” He kept watch over the manor until morning and slept by day. He had hardly anything to do: Tikhon Ilitch had made haste to settle up Durnovka affairs betimes that year, and out of all the cattle only one horse and a cow remained. So things were quiet, even rather boresome, at the manor-house. The clear days were followed by colder days, bluish-grey, soundless. The goldfinches and tomtits began to whistle in the bare park, the cross-bills to pipe in the fir trees, the cedar-birds made their appearance, bullfinches, and some sort of leisurely tiny birds which hopped in flocks from place to place on the threshing-floor, whose supportswere already sprouting with bright green new growths; sometimes a very silent, light little bird of that sort perched all alone on a spear of grass in the field. In the vegetable gardens behind Durnovka, the last potatoes were being dug among the sheaves. And at times, as evening drew on, some one of the peasants would stand there for a long space, absorbed in thought and gazing at the fields, as he bore on his back a plaited basket filled with ears of grain. Darkness began to fall early, and at the manor-house they said: “How late the train passes by nowadays!” although there had been no change in the schedule of the trains. Kuzma sat near the window and read newspapers all day long; he had written down his spring trip to Kazakovo and his conversations with Akim; he had jotted down remarks in an old account book—all he had seen and heard in the village. What occupied his attention most of all was Syery, the Grey Man.
THE village was deserted. Many had gone away to work on the clover. Trifon had died in mid-August, at Assumption-tide—he had choked himself, as he broke the fast, on a bit of raw ham. At the beginning of September Komar, one of the chief rioters, renowned for his strength, his cleverness, and his daring in his dealings with the membersof the gentry class, had entered a distillery near Eletz, fallen into the malt-kiln while in a state of intoxication, and been suffocated. No one had known that he was there, and the door had been bolted. Komar had bent the door in his efforts to escape into the air, but evidently such a death had been written in his fate. Another rebel, Vanka Krasny, had again betaken himself to the Donetz mines. The harness-maker was working about on different estates. Rodka was working on the railway. Deniska had disappeared somewhere. And everybody hypocritically pitied Syery, taking advantage of the opportunity to ridicule both son and father. Yakoff’s hands trembled when he began to talk about Syery. And what could they do but tremble? What had that Syery done with the land which Yakoff was ready to “devour in handfuls”? No one in all Durnovka suffered the hundredth part of what Yakoff suffered when rumours became current about rebellions, cases of arson, and the expropriation of land. He merely held his peace—thanks to that subterranean secretiveness which thousands of his forebears had sucked in with their mothers’ milk. And, indeed, his breath would have failed him had he tried to speak. Now, when the rumours became more and more desperate, he even became reconciled to his son Vaska, for the sake of the land. His son was a pock-marked, rough, thickset young fellow, all overgrown with a beard at the age of twenty, broad-shouldered, curly-haired, and so strong that even pincers could not have pulled out a single one of his hairs. The son, with that beard,his head closely clipped, garbed in a red shirt, resembled a convict, but he dressed his wife in the style of a petty citizen of the towns. He had turned out the image of his father so far as greed was concerned, and had already begun to trade secretly in vodka, coarse tobacco, soap, and kerosene. And Yakoff became reconciled, in the hope of satisfying his land-hunger by the aid of his son—in the hope that he might become rich and begin to lease it. Why did Syery make peace with Deniska, who had repeatedly given him “a healthy drubbing”? What was he hoping for, that he thus altered his course, like the poorest beggar? He had leased his land, he did not live out on jobs. He sat at home cold and hungry and had no thought for anything save how he might procure the wherewithal for a smoke: he could not get through the day without his pipe. He attended all the village assemblies, but always arrived just as they were coming to an end. He never missed a single wedding or baptism or funeral, although he huddled up against the door; and when he extended his hand to the host, who was serving refreshments to his guests, he not infrequently received nothing but rough denunciations. Syery did not care greatly for liquor, but no drinking to seal a bargain ever passed off without his presence: he intruded himself not only into all the community drinking-bouts, but also into all those of his neighbours—after purchases, sales, and exchanges. And his neighbours had grown so accustomed to this that they were not even surprisedwhen Syery presented himself. And he really was entertaining to listen to.
“He is valiant, so far as words go,” people said of Syery. And it was true: if he were at ease in his mind—and he was at ease when his pouch was filled with tobacco—what an active, serious peasant Syery could appear to be!
“Well, now, ’tis time to marry off my son,” he argued in leisurely fashion, as he held his pipe between his teeth and ground the stalks of the coarse tobacco by strong rubbing in his palms. “If he gets married, he’ll bring every kopek home, he will become eager for work, he’ll take to digging round about the house as a beetle burrows in a dung-heap. And we’re not afraid of work, brother! Only give us a chance!”
But Syery almost never had either peace of mind or work. His appearance justified his nickname: he was grey, lean, of medium stature, with sloping shoulders; his short coat was extremely short, tattered, and dirty; his felt boots were broken and their soles were made of rope; as for his cap, it is not worth mentioning at all. As he sat in his cottage, with this cap eternally on his head, his pipe never removed from his mouth, and anxiously meditated upon something or other, he had the appearance of living in imminent vague expectation. But, according to his own statement, he had devilish bad luck. Nothing worth while ever came his way. Well, and he didn’t care about playing jackstraws—taking chances. Every one was on the watch to condemn a man, ofcourse. “’Tis well known that the tongue can break bones, though it has none itself,” Syery was wont to remark. “Do you first place the job in my hand, and then you can jabber.”
He had a fairly large amount of land—three desyatini. But he was taxed for ten. And Syery no longer put a hand to his land: “You simply have to give it up, that land: dear heart, it ought to be kept in proper order, but where’s the order here?” He himself planted no more than half a field, and even the grain in that he sold standing—he “got rid of the unwelcome for the welcome.” And again he had a reason ready: “Only wait to see what comes of it—just you try it!”
“’Tis always better, for example, to await the upshot of anything,” muttered Yakoff with a sidelong glance and a malicious laugh.
But Syery laughed also, sadly and scornfully. “Yes, ’tis better!” he grinned. “It’s all well enough for you to chatter nonsense: you’ve got a husband for your girl, and married off your son. But just look at me and the lot of small children who sit in the corner at my house. They don’t belong to other folks, you see. And I keep a goat for them, and I’m fattening a young pig. They have to have food and drink, don’t they?”
“Well, but a goat is nothing new, for example, in such cases,” retorted Yakoff, getting angry. “The trouble with you is, for example, that you think of nothing but vodka and tobacco, tobacco and vodka.” And, in order to avoid a senseless quarrel with his neighbour, he hastened to get away from Syery.
But Syery calmly and practically shouted after him: “A drunkard will come to his senses, brother, but a fool never will.”
After sharing his property with his brother, Syery had wandered about for a long time, living in hired lodgings, and had got jobs in the town and on divers estates. He also went to work on the clover. And, on that job, luck one day came his way. An organized gang of workmen which Syery had joined engaged themselves to get in a large crop at eighty kopeks a pud,[33]but behold, the crop turned out twice as heavy as had been calculated. They winnowed it, and Syery was hired to run the machine. He drove some of the grain out through the waste-spout and bought it. And he grew rich: that same autumn he built a brick cottage. But his calculations had been faulty: it turned out that the cottage must be heated. And where was the money to come from? that was the question. Why, there was not even enough to provide food. So it became necessary to burn the top of the cottage; and there it stood, roofless, for a year, and turned completely black. And the chimney went for the price of a horse-collar. There were no horses as yet, it is true; but, naturally, one must begin to fit oneself out some time or other. And Syery let his arms fall by his side in despair: he decided to sell the cottage, to build a cheaper one of beaten clay. His argument ran as follows: There must be in the cottage—well, at the very least, ten thousand bricks; he could sell them for five or even six rubles a thousand; the sum-total,of course, would be about one hundred and fifty rubles. But it turned out that there were only three thousand five hundred bricks, and he was forced to accept two rubles and a half for each girder, instead of five rubles. And for a long time a bare mound of rubbish occupied the site of the splendid cottage, solidifying under the rain: there was no money available for clearing it away, and one’s hands simply refused to undertake the task. Yakoff harangued on the subject: “Matters ought, for example, to have been more cheaply managed from the start.” “But, devil take it,” Syery said to himself, “a cheap thing doesn’t last long, does it?” And, much troubled in mind, he proceeded to look up a new cottage—and spent a whole year in bargaining for precisely those which were beyond his means. He had reconciled himself to his present domicile merely in the firm expectation of a future cottage which should be strong, spacious, and warm.
“I simply don’t intend to live on here!” he snapped one day.
Yakoff stared at him attentively and shook his cap. “Exactly so. That means you are expecting your ships to come in?”
“They’ll come, all right,” replied Syery mysteriously.
“Oï, drop your nonsense,” said Yakoff. “Get yourself a place somewhere—anywhere you can—and keep your teeth, for example, in their proper place.”
But the thought of a fine farmstead, good order,some suitable, real work, poisoned Syery’s entire life. He got bored when working in a place.
“Evidently, working at home isn’t as sweet as honey, either,” said his neighbours.
“Never you mind, it might be honey-sweet if the house were managed sensibly!”
“Just so. And will you take a place by the month, or until the working season?”
“I’ll get one, never fear. Oversight is needed at home, isn’t it?”
“But all you do is to sit in the house and smoke your pipe.”
“What am I to do, then? can’t I even smoke?”
And Syery, suddenly becoming animated, jerked the cold pipe out of his mouth and began his favourite story: how, while still a bachelor, he had lived two full years honestly and nobly at the house of a priest near Eletz. “Yes, and if I were to go there this minute, they would fairly tear me to pieces with joy!” he exclaimed. “I need say only one word: ‘I’ve come, papa, to work for you—will you take me or not?’ ‘But why do you ask that, light of my life? Don’t I know you? Yes, good Lord, live here with us for ever and ever, if you will’!”
“Well, and you might go there, for example—”
“I might go there! Look at them—all those brats in the corner! We know all about that; ’tis another man’s grief, I’ll not meddle. But a man is being wasted here, in vain.”
SYERY was being wasted, in vain, this year also. He had sat at home all winter long, with care-worn countenance, without light, cold and hungry. During the Great Fast (Lent), he had managed somehow or other to get a place with Rusanoff, near Tula: no one in his own neighbourhood would any longer give him a place. But before the month was out, Rusanoff’s establishment had become more repulsive to him than a bitter radish.
“Oï, young fellow!” the manager once remarked to him. “I can see right through you: you are picking a quarrel so that you can take to your heels. Here, you dog, here’s your money in advance, and now be off with you into the bushes!”
“Perhaps some sort of vagabond might take himself off, but not me,” retorted Syery sharply.
But the manager did not understand the hint. And it became necessary to adopt more decisive means. One day Syery was set to hauling in some husks for the cattle. He went to the threshing-floor and began to load a cart with straw. The manager came along:
“Didn’t I tell you, in good plain Russian, to load up with husks?”
“’Tis not the right time to load them,” replied Syery firmly.
“Why not?”
“Sensible farmers give husks for dinner, not at night.”
“And how do you come to be a teacher?”
“I don’t like to starve the cattle. That’s all there is to my being a teacher.”
“But you are hauling straw.”
“One must know the proper time for everything.”
“Stop loading this very minute.”
Syery turned pale. “No, I won’t stop my work. I can’t stop my work.”
“Hand me over that fork, you dog, and get out, lest worse happen.”
“I’m no dog, but a baptized Christian man. When I’ve driven in this load, I’ll get out. And I’ll go for good.”
“Well, brother, that’s not likely! You’ll go away, and pretty soon you’ll be back again—and get locked up in the county jail.”
Syery leaped from the cart and hurled his pitchfork into the straw: “I’m going to be locked up, am I?”
“Yes, you are!”
“Hey, young fellow, see that you don’t get locked up yourself! As if we didn’t know something about you! The master has nothing good to say about you, either, brother—”
The manager’s fat cheeks became suffused with dark blood, his eyeballs protruded until they seemed all whites. With the back of his wrist he thrust his peaked cap over on the nape of his neck and, drawing a deep breath, he rapidly ejaculated: “A—ah! So that’s theway of it! Hasn’t a good word to say of me? Tell me, if that’s the case—why not?”
“I have nothing to say,” mumbled Syery, feeling his legs instantaneously grow cold with fear.
“Yes, you have, brother: you’re talking nonsense—you’ll tell!”
“Well, and what became of the flour?” suddenly shouted Syery.
“The flour? What flour?”
“The stolen flour. From the mill.”
The manager seized Syery by the collar in a death-like grip, fit to suffocate him, and for the space of a moment the two stood stock still.
“What do you mean by it—grabbing a man like that, by his shirt?” calmly inquired Syery. “Do you want to choke me?” Then, all of a sudden, he began to squeak furiously: “Come on, thrash me, thrash while your heart is hot!” And with a jerk he wrenched himself free and seized his pitchfork.
“Come on, men!” the manager yelled, although there was no one anywhere in the vicinity. “Help the manager! Hearken to this: he tried to stab me to death, the dog!”
“Don’t come near me, or I’ll break your nose,” said Syery, balancing his pitchfork. “Don’t forget, times are not what they used to be!”
But at this point the manager made a wide sweep with his arm, and Syery flew headlong into the straw.
The melancholy which had once more begun to take powerful effect on Kuzma along with the change in weather, went on constantly increasing in force in proportionto his closer acquaintance with Dumovka, with Syery. At first the latter was merely sad and ridiculous: what a stupid man! Then he became irritating and repulsive: a degenerate! All summer long he had sat on the doorstep of his cottage smoking, waiting for favours from the Duma. All the autumn he had roamed from farmstead to farmstead, in the hope of attaching himself to some one who was bound for the clover work. On a hot, sunny day a new grain-rick on the edge of the village took fire. Syery was the first person to present himself at the conflagration, where he shouted himself hoarse, singed his eyelashes off, and got drenched to the skin directing the water-carriers and the men who, pitchforks in hand, flung themselves into the huge rosy-golden flame, dragging out in all directions the blazing thatches, and those who merely dashed about in the midst of the fire, the crackling flames, the gushing water, the uproar, the holy pictures, casks, and spinning-wheels heaped up near the cottages, the sobbing women, and the showers of blackened leaves scattered abroad from the burnt bushes. But what did he do that was practical? In October, when, after inundating rains and an icy storm, the pond froze over and a neighbour’s boar-pig slipped from an ice-clad mound, broke through the ice, and began to drown, Syery was the first to arrive at full speed, leap into the water, and save it. But why? In order that he might be the hero of the day, that he might have the right to rush from the pond into the servants’ hall, demand vodka, tobacco, and a bite to eat. At first he was all purple; his teeth were chattering;he could barely move his white lips as he dressed himself from head to foot in some one else’s clothes—Koshel’s. Then he became animated, got intoxicated, began to brag—and once more narrated how he had served honestly, nobly, at a priest’s, and how cleverly he had married off his daughter several years previously. He sat at the table greedily devouring chunks of raw ham and announcing in self-satisfied wise:
“Good. Matriushka, my girl, you see, had been making up to that Yegor. Well, she made eyes at him and made up to him. Nothing happened. One evening I was sitting, so, near the window, when I saw Yegor walk past the cottage once, then again—and that daughter of mine keeps diving, diving toward the window. That signifies, says I to myself, that they’ve settled matters. And I said to my wife: ‘Do you go give the cattle their fodder: I’m off, summoned to the village assembly.’ I set myself down on the straw behind the cottage, and there I sat and waited. And the first snow began to fall. And I saw Yegorka come sneaking along again. And she was on hand too. They went behind the cellar-house; then—they whisked into the cottage, the new empty one alongside. I waited a bit—”
“A nice story!” remarked Kuzma, with an embarrassed laugh.
But Syery took that for praise, for enthusiasm over his cleverness and craft. And, feeling himself a hero, he went on, now raising his voice, now viciously lowering it: “So there I sat and listened, and waited to find out what would happen next. So, as I was saying,I waited a bit—then after them I went. I leaped over the threshold—and straight at her, and seized her! Weren’t they frightened, though—horribly! He tumbled flat on the floor, as limp as a sack—helpless enough for any one to cut his throat—while she went off in a faint—lay there like a dead duck. ‘Well,’ says he, ‘now thrash me.’ That was what he said. ‘I don’t ne-ed to thrash you,’ says I. I took his coat, and I took his waistcoat, too—left him in his drawers only—pretty nearly in the condition when his mother gave him birth. ‘Now,’ says I, ‘get out, go wherever you please.’ And I myself set out for my house. I looked round—and he was behind me. The snow was white, and he was white, and he was sniffling. He had no place to go—whither could he run? But my Matryona Mikolavna rushes off to the fields the minute I am out of the cottage! She went at a lively pace—a woman neighbour had difficulty in grabbing her by the sleeve when she had got almost to Basovka, and brought her to me. I let her rest a while, then I said: ‘We are poor folks, ain’t we?’ She said never a word. ‘And your mother—is she a poor wretch, or is she a decent woman?’ No answer. ‘You’ve put us to shame. Hey, haven’t you? What do you mean by it—are you thinking you’ll fill my house with that sort, with your bastards—and I’m to shut my eyes to what’s going on? Seeing how poor we are, you ought to watch what you’re about, and not make us a laughing-stock, dragging your maiden braids all over the place—you trash!’ Then I began to tan her hide—I had a fine suitable little whip on hand. Well, to say it simply,I cut up her whole body to such a degree that she slid down at my feet and kissed my felt boots, while he sat up on the bench and yelled. Then I began on him, the dear man—”
“And did he marry her?” inquired Kuzma.
“I should say he did!” exclaimed Syery; and, conscious that intoxication was getting the better of him, he began to scrape up the fragments of ham from the platter and stuff them into the pockets of his breeches. “And what a wedding we made of it! As for the expense, I don’t have to blink my eyes over that, brother!”
“WELL, that was a fine tale!” Kuzma meditated within himself, for a long time after that evening. And the weather turned bad, to boot. He did not feel like writing; his melancholy increased in strength. The poverty and lack of practical common sense on the part of Syery and Deniska amazed him: the village was rotting! The beastly tale of the Bride’s experience in the orchard, the death of Rodka, stupefied him. The life of Tikhon Ilitch astonished him. And it certainly took a good deal to astonish him! Didn’t he know his country, his people? With grief and anger he poured out his heart to Tikhon Ilitch, exhorted him, stung him. But if Tikhon Ilitch had only known with what joy Kuzmarushed to the window when he espied on the porch his overcoat, his peaked cap, and his grey beard! How afraid he was lest his brother would not spend the night with him, how he tried to detain him as long as possible, dragged him into discussions, reminiscences! Kuzma found the situation tiresome late in the autumn; ugh, how boresome! The sole joy he had was when some one presented himself with a petition. Gololoby from Baskova came several times—a peasant with a perfectly bald head and a huge cap—to write a complaint against his daughter’s father-in-law for breaking his collar-bone. The widow Butylotchka came from the promontory to have a letter written to her son; and she was a mass of rags, wet through and icy cold with the rain. She was tearful when she began to dictate.
“Town of Serpukhoff, at the Nobility Bath-Zheltukhin house—”
Here she burst out weeping.
“Well, what next?” asked Kuzma, sorrowfully gazing sidewise at Butylotchka, after the fashion of old people, over his eyeglasses. “Well, I’ve written that. What more?”
“What more?” inquired Butylotchka in a whisper, and, making an effort to control her voice, she went on: “Write further, my dear, in your very best style: To be given to Mikhail Nazarytch Khlusoff—into his own hands, you understand—” Then she began—now with pauses, now entirely without: “A letter to our dear and beloved son, Misha, why have you forgotten us, Misha, we haven’t had a word from you. Youknow yourself that we are living in lodgings, and now they are turning us out, and where are we to go now. Our dear little son Misha, we beg you, for the Lord God’s sake, that you will come home as fast as you can—” And once more, through her tears, in a whisper: “Then you and we will dig out an earthen hut, and so we shall be in a home of our own....”
The storms and icy downpours of rain, the days that seemed all twilight, the mud at the manor-farm, all besprinkled with the fine yellow foliage of the acacias, the boundless ploughed fields and fields of winter grain round about Durnovka, and the dark clouds which endlessly hung over them—all began once more to oppress him with a fierce hatred for this accursed country where there were eight months of snow-storms and four of rain-storms; where for the commonest needs of nature one was forced to go to the barn or the cherry-shed. When the bad weather set in it became necessary to board up the drawing-room closely and move into the hall, so as to sleep all winter long there, and dine, and smoke, and pass the long evenings by the light of a dim kitchen lamp, pacing from corner to corner, muffled up in overcoat and cap, which barely protected one from the cold and the wind that blew in through the crevices. Sometimes it happened that they forgot to renew the supply of kerosene, and Kuzma passed the twilight hours wholly without a light; and at times, of an evening, he lighted a candle end merely for the purpose of supping off potato soup and warm wheat groats, which the Bride served in silence and with a stern countenance.
“Whither can I go?” Kuzma said to himself, once in a while.
There were only three neighbours in the immediate vicinity: old Princess Shakova, who did not receive even the Marshal of Nobility, because she regarded him as ill-bred; the retired gendarme Zakrzhevsky, a hæmorrhoidally vicious and self-conceitedly stupid man who would not have permitted Kuzma to cross his threshold; and, finally, a member of the gentry, Basoff, a petty landed proprietor who lived in a peasant cottage, had married the dissipated widow of a soldier, and could talk of nothing but horse-collars and cattle. Father Petr, the priest from Kolodeza, of which Durnovka was a parish, called once upon Kuzma. But neither the one nor the other cared to continue the acquaintance. Kuzma entertained the priest with nothing stronger than tea—and the priest laughed harshly and awkwardly when he saw the samovar on the table. “A samovar-man! Capital! You, I see, are no match for your good brother—you’re not lavish in your entertainment!” Kuzma announced frankly that he never went to church, out of conviction. The priest began to shout with laughter in more amazement than ever, and still more harshly and loudly: “A—ah! Those nice little new ideas! Capital! And it’s cheaper, too!” Laughter was not in the least becoming to him: it was as if some one else were laughing for that tall, lean man with the big cheek-bones and coarse black hair, the furtive greedy eyes—anxiously absent-minded eyes, for ever meditating something offensive and tactlessly free of manner. “But atnight, surely, at night you cross yourself, nevertheless—you get scared?” he said, loudly and hurriedly, as he put on his coat and overshoes in the ante-room, amazing Kuzma by his queries concerning the management of the farm, and suddenly beginning to address him as “thou.”
“Yes, I make the sign of the cross,” admitted Kuzma, with a melancholy smile. “But, you know, fear is not faith, and I don’t cross myself to your God.”
Kuzma did not go often to visit his brother. And the latter came to him only when he was perturbed over something. Altogether, the loneliness was so desperate that at times Kuzma called himself Dreyfus on Devil’s Island. He compared himself to Syery. Ah, and he too, like Syery, was poor, weak of will, forced out of his proper course, and all his life had been waiting for some happy days, for work.
An unpleasant memory lingered of drunken Syery’s bravery, his story, his boastfulness. But, ordinarily, Syery was not like that, even when he was intoxicated: he was merely loquacious, troubled by something, and merry in a timid way. Moreover, he did not have an opportunity to get drunk more than five times in the course of a year. He was not eager for liquor—not at all as he was for tobacco. For the sake of tobacco he was ready to endure any and all humiliations; ready to sit for hours by the side of a man who was smoking, agree with everything he said, flatter him, do anything in order that he might, after awaiting a favourable moment, say as if quite accidentally: “Pray, gossip, give me a filling for my pipe.” He was passionatelyfond, also, of cards, long conversations, evening reunions in the cottages—in those cottages where there were large families, where it was warm, and where a light was burning; where itinerant wool-carders prepared the wool, and roving tailors made winter coats. But people were not, as yet, assembling thus in the cottages, and Syery sat at home. After Kuzma had been to see him a few times he felt that it was not right to bear malice toward Syery or to make fun of him. Syery lived on what was earned by day-labour during the working season—by his wife, a peaceable, silent, rather crack-brained woman—and on what he managed to beg from Deniska (who now and then made his appearance in Durnovka with his valise, white bread, and sausage, of which he was inordinately fond, cursing the Tsar and the gentry without the slightest restraint). At the first snowfall Syery went away somewhere and was gone for a week. He returned home in a gloomy mood.
“Have you been at Rusanoff’s again?” the neighbours inquired.
“Yes, I have,” replied Syery.
“Why?”
“He was urging me to hire with him.”
“Just so. You did not consent?”
“More stupid than he I have never been and never shall be, for ever and a day. You don’t suppose I signed the contract with my own blood?”
And Syery sat there on the bench for a long time, without removing his cap. And the mere sight of his cottage in the twilight made one sad at heart. In thetwilight, beyond the broad snow-covered ravine, Durnovka lay in melancholy blackness, with its grain-ricks and bushes in the back yards. But when darkness fully descended, and the little lights began to twinkle, it seemed as if all were peaceful and cosy in the cottages. Syery’s hut alone remained disagreeably black. It was dull, dead. Kuzma knew all about it: if you entered its half-open ante-room, you felt almost as if you were on the threshold of some wild beast’s lair. There was an odour of snow; through the holes in the roof the gloomy sky was visible; the wind rustled the manure and the dry branches which had been tossed at haphazard upon the rafters; if, by feeling about, you found the slanting wall and opened door, you would encounter cold, darkness, a frost-covered little window barely discernible through the gloom. No one was to be seen, but one could guess how things were: the master of the house was sitting on the bench—his pipe glowed with a tiny fire; the housewife was quietly rocking a squeaking cradle in which a pale child with the rickets, and drowsy with hunger, was jolting about. The brood of small children had taken refuge on top of the oven, which was barely warm, and were vivaciously narrating something to one another in a whisper. In the rotten straw beneath the sleeping-board, the goat and the suckling pig, which were great chums, were rustling about. It was necessary to bend down terribly, in order to avoid knocking one’s head on the ceiling. Then, too, you could not turn about without taking precautions: the distancebetween the threshold and the opposite wall was not more than five paces.
“Who’s there?” a low voice resounded from the darkness.
“I.”
“It can’t be Kuzma Ilitch, can it?”
“’Tis he himself.”
Syery moves aside, makes room on the bench. Kuzma sits down and lights his pipe. Oppressed by the darkness, Syery is simple, sad, confesses to his weaknesses. Now and then his voice quivers.
THE long, snowy winter set in.
The plain, gleaming palely white beneath a bluish lowering sky, appeared broader, more spacious, and even more deserted than ever. The cottages, sheds, bushes, grain-ricks stood out sharply against the new-fallen snow. Then the blizzards began and swept the country, burying it under so much snow that the village assumed a bleak northern aspect and began to show as its black points only the doors and tiny windows, which hardly peeped out from beneath white snow caps pulled well down, from amid the white masses of the earthen banks around the houses. Following the blizzards, across the concealed grey surface of the frozen crust on the fields sweptcruel winds which tore away the last remaining light-brown foliage from the unsheltered oak scrub in the ravines. And then the one-farm owner, Taras Milyaeff, who resembled a native Siberian and was as keen on hunting as a real Siberian, set forth, plunging deep into the impenetrable snowdrifts, all dotted with the footprints of hares, and the water barrels were converted into frozen blocks, and slippery ice-coated hillocks formed around the water-holes; the roads wound among snowdrifts—and the ordinary winter conditions reigned. Epidemic diseases broke out in the villages: smallpox, typhus, scarlet fever, croup. But those maladies had existed uninterruptedly in the countryside since time immemorial, during the winter season, and people had become so used to them that they made no more mention of them than they did of changes in the weather. Around the holes cut in the ice, at which all Durnovka drank, over the fetid dark bottle-green water, the peasant women stood for days at a time, bent low, with their petticoats tucked up higher than their bare blue knees: they were in wet bast-slippers, and their heads were hugely muffled. Out of their iron kettles of ashes they dragged their own grey hempen chemises, patched to the waist with calico; their husbands’ heavy breeches; their children’s soiled swaddling-cloths—rinsed them out, beat them with clothes-mallets, and screamed at one another, imparting the information that their hands were “numbed from the steam,” that at Makaroff’s homestead his wife was dying of the typhus, that Yakoff’s daughter-in-law had got her throat stoppedup. The little girls capered out of the cottages, straight from the stoves, with nothing on but their tiny chemises, and round the corner on the mounds of hardened snow. The little boys, dressed in their fathers’ old clothes, slid down the hills on their rude sleds, flew head over heels, screeched, were racked with terrible coughs, and returned home at evening in a state of fever, with heavy, bewildered heads. They were so chilled that they could barely move their lips as they begged for a drink, and, after drinking, they crept tearfully upon the oven. But even the mothers paid no attention to those who were ill. And darkness settled down at three o’clock, and the shaggy dogs sat on the roofs, almost on a level with the snowdrifts. Not a soul knew on what food those dogs existed. Nevertheless they were lively, even ferocious.
People woke early in the manor-house. At daybreak in the blue darkness, when the lights began to twinkle from the cottages, they made the fires in the stoves, and through the crevices under the eaves slowly poured the thick milky smoke. In the wing, with its frozen grey window, it became as cold as in the vestibule. Kuzma was awakened by the banging of doors and the rustling of frozen, snow-coated straw which Koshel was dragging from the truck-sledge. His low, hoarse voice became audible—the voice of a man who had risen earlier than any one else, working on an empty stomach, and chilled through. The pipe of the samovar began to rattle, and the Bride conversed with Koshel in a stern whisper. She did not sleep in the servants’ quarters, where the roaches bit arms andlegs until they drew blood, but in the ante-room—and the whole village was convinced that there was a good reason for this. The village knew well what the Bride had undergone in the autumn: how she had been overwhelmed with disgrace—Rodka’s death—how her mother had gone away on a begging expedition, having locked up the empty cottage. Silent, crushed by the burden of her sorrow, the Bride was more severe and mournful than a cloistered nun. But what cared the village for other people’s woes? Kuzma had already heard, from Odnodvorka, what was being said in the village, and, as he woke, he always recalled it with shame and disgust. He pounded on the wall with his fist and, clearing his throat, began to smoke a cigarette: this quieted his heart and relieved his chest. He slept under his sheepskin coat, and, loath to part with the warmth, he continued to smoke, and said to himself: “A shameless people! Why, I have a daughter almost as old as she is....” The fact that a young woman slept on the other side of the partition wall excited only paternal tenderness in him. By day she was taciturn and serious, niggardly of words, shy with the modesty of a young maiden. And when she was asleep, there was even something childlike, sad, and lonely about her. One day she fell asleep after dinner on her chest in the ante-room, her head wrapped in a hempen shawl, her legs drawn up and one knee revealed. Her feet, in their bark shoes, lay in womanly wise, and the chilled knee gleamed white like that of a little girl. And Kuzma, as he passed her, turned away and called to her, sothat she woke up and covered it. But would the village believe that? Even Tikhon Ilitch did not believe it: he laughed in a very peculiar way, at times. Indeed, he always had been distrustful, suspicious, coarse in his suspicions; and now he had completely lost his head. Say what you would to him, he had one answer for everything.
“Have you heard, Tikhon Ilitch? They say that Zakrzhevsky is dying of catarrh: they have taken him to Orel.”
“Stuff and nonsense. We know what that catarrh really is!”
“But the medical man told me.”
“Believe him if it suits you—”
“I want to subscribe to a newspaper,” you would say to him. “Please let me have ten rubles of my wages on account.”
“Hm! Why does a man want to stuff his head with lies? Well, and to tell the truth, I haven’t more than fifteen or twenty kopeks in my pocket—”
The Bride would enter the room, with downcast eyes: “We have hardly any flour on hand, Tikhon Ilitch—”
“How comes that? Hardly any? Oï, you’re talking nonsense, woman!” And he would contract his brows in a frown. And while he was proving that the flour ought to last for another three days, at least, he kept darting swift glances now at Kuzma, now at the Bride. Once he even inquired, with a grin: “And how do you sleep—all right? are you warm?”
And the Bride, who was embarrassed already by his visits, blushed deeply and, bowing her head, left the room, while Kuzma’s fingers turned cold with shame and wrath.
“Shame on you, brother Tikhon Ilitch,” he blurted out, turning away to the window. “And especially after what you told me yourself—”
“But then why did she blush?” inquired Tikhon Ilitch maliciously, with a perturbed and awkward smile.
THE most unpleasant thing in the morning was—washing oneself. A frosty atmosphere was brought into the ante-room with the straw; ice that was like broken glass floated in the wash-basin. Kuzma sometimes began to drink his tea after having washed only his hands and, thus fresh from his slumbers, appeared truly an old man. Thanks to lack of cleanliness and the cold, he had grown extremely thin and grey since the autumn. His hands had grown thinner, and the skin on them had become more delicate, shiny, and covered with certain tiny purplish spots.
“The old grey horse has gone down a steep hill,” he said to himself.
It was a grey morning. Beneath the crusted grey snow the village also had become quite grey in hueby St. Philip’s Day. The frozen household linen hung like grey boards from the rafters under the roofs of the sheds. Everything round about the cottages was frozen—they poured out the slops and threw out the ashes. Tattered little urchins hurried through the streets between the cottages and sheds to school, ran up the snowdrifts and slid down them on their bark slippers; all of them had heavy crash bags containing slates and bread. From the opposite direction came aged, ailing dark-faced Tohugunok,[34]with not a trace of his former agility remaining, clad in his thin little overcoat, and bowed beneath the weight of his yoke, from which hung two buckets; stumbling along in his hideous felt boots, which had turned stiff as oaken boards, and were bound with pigskin. From drift to drift a horse dragged the water-cask, plugged with straw, rocking and splashing as it went; and behind it ran white-eyed Kobylyai—the stammerer. Women passed, on their way to borrow from one another salt, millet, a scoop of flour for griddlecakes, or a hasty pudding. The threshing-floors were deserted. Only at Yakoff’s place was smoke issuing from the gate of the kiln: in imitation of the rich peasants, he threshed during the winter. And beyond the threshing-floors, beyond the bare bushes in the back yards, beneath a low-hanging whitish sky, stretched the grey snow-covered plain, a waste of snow-crust frozen in the semblance of waves. It was in truth more cosy in the village, but the place seemed infected with theplague: almost every household had a case of smallpox or spotted typhus.
Occasionally Kuzma went to eat luncheon with Koshel in the servants’ quarters—potatoes as hot as fire itself, or the remains of the sour cabbage soup left over from the previous day. He recalled the town where he had lived all his life, and was amazed to find that he had no longing whatsoever to go back there. The town was Tikhon’s cherished dream; he scorned and hated the country with all his soul. Kuzma only tried to hate it. He now reviewed his existence with more terror than ever. He had grown thoroughly wild and unsociable in Durnovka; he did nothing, was bored, was distressed by his own idleness; frequently he omitted to wash himself; he did not take off his undercoat; he ate greedily out of one bowl with Koshel. But the worst of it all was that, while alarmed at his mode of existence, which was aging him not merely from day to day but actually from hour to hour, he was conscious that it was nevertheless agreeable to him; that he seemed to have got back into precisely that rut which, possibly, had rightly belonged to him from the day of his birth. Not for nothing, apparently, did the Durnovka blood flow in his veins! Nevertheless, that interminable Durnovka winter oppressed him to the point of pain—those cottages, the holes in the ice of the pond, the horrid little boys, the dogs on the roofs, the cold, the dirt, the sickness, the animal-like laziness of the peasant men. Nearly every day he called to mind Menshoff, Akim, Syery....
After luncheon he sometimes took a stroll over the manor-farm or in the village. He went also to Yakoff’s threshing-floor, or dropped in at the cottage of Syery or that of Koshel, whose old woman lived alone, was reputed to be a witch, was tall and frightfully emaciated, and had teeth as intrusively conspicuous as those of a skull. She spoke roughly and decisively, like a man, and smoked a pipe: she would make a fire in the stove, seat herself on the sleeping-board, and set to smoking, all by herself, swinging back and forth as she did so her long, thin leg in its heavy black bark shoe. During the entire Fast Kuzma went away from the farm only twice—once to the post-office, and once to see his brother. And those little trips were pleasant, but painful; Kuzma got so thoroughly chilled that he could not feel whether he had any feet or not. At the beginning of the autumn he had still possessed a firm glance, a tidy appearance. But the firmness of the glance had vanished, and his clothing had grown dilapidated. The collar of his shirt was reduced to a fringe, and the elbows of his coat wore through; his calfskin boots had become fairly red with rust, thin, and, in places, gaping. His sheepskin coat had served him so long that it was dotted all over with bald spots. And the wind on the plain was savage. After sitting in the house so long at Durnovka he was not able to endure the strong, fresh winter air. After prolonged inspection of the village the snowy grey expanse came as a surprise; the far distance, enveloped in blue tints of winter, seemed as a picture so beautiful that one could never gaze one’s fill. The horse dashed alongsmartly in the face of the harsh wind, snorting as he went; frozen lumps of snow flew from beneath his shod hoofs against the dashboard of the sledge. Koshel, with a blackish-purple frost-bitten cheek, briskly clearing his throat, sprang from the box at the slopes and leaped back into the sledge sidewise, on the run. But the wind pierced straight through him; his feet, tucked into straw that was all mixed with snow, ached and stiffened; his forehead and cheek-bones were racked with rheumatic pains. And it was so boresome in the low-ceiled post-office at Ulianovka—boresome as it can be only in official offices in the wilds. There was an odour of mildew, of sealing-wax. The ragged postman was pounding with his stamp. Grumpy Sakharoff, who resembled a gorilla, was roaring at the peasants, raging because it had not occurred to Kuzma to send him half a dozen fowls or, at least, a pud of flour; and he inquired: “What’s your name, and your family name?”—and, after rummaging in the closet, he announced with decision: “Nothing for you.” In the vicinity of Tikhon Ilitch’s house Kuzma was upset by the stench of manure fumes, which reminded him that in the world exist towns, people, newspapers, news. It was agreeable, also, to chat with his brother, to rest at his house and get warm.
But the chat never was a success. His brother was called off every minute to the shop, or about some detail of domestic management, and, besides, he could talk of nothing but his property matters, the lies, craftiness, and malice of the peasants—about the sheer necessity of getting rid of the estate as speedily aspossible. Nastasya Petrovna was pitiable. Evidently she had come to fear her husband most terribly; she burst into the conversation at unseasonable moments, at equally unseasonable moments she praised him—his intelligence, his keen managerial eye, the fact that he entered into everything, every minute detail of the business, himself.
“And he’s so accessible to every one, so approachable!” she said—and Tikhon Ilitch roughly cut her short, while Kuzma did not know what to say, fearing to get mixed up in a quarrel. They had exchanged roles: now it was not he who suggested alarm, but his brother who frightened and exhorted him; it was not he but his brother who demonstrated that it was impossible to live in Russia. After an hour of that sort of conversation, Kuzma began to long to get home, to get back to the manor. “What is to become of me?” he thought in alarm, as he listened to his brother discussing the sale of the estate. And was it possible that that dreadful marriage between Deniska and the Bride would come off? And why did Tikhon so obstinately insist that the marriage must take place? “He has gone mad, he certainly has gone mad!” muttered Kuzma on his way home, as he called to mind Tikhon’s surly and malevolent face, his uncommunicativeness, his suspiciousness, and his wearisome repetition of one and the same thing over and over. He began to shout at Koshel, at the horse, feeling in a hurry to hide in his little house his sadness, his old, cold clothing, his loneliness, and his tenderness at the thought of the Bride’s sweet, sorrowful face, her womanliness and—hertaciturnity. “Ekh, and how could she fail to go to ruin here!” he said sadly to himself, as he gazed through the twilight gloom at the meagre lights in Durnovka.