‘Women!’ he would say.
The two stones at the mill worked day and night. I helped Stefan and I enjoyed it. Whenever he went away I willingly took over.
XI
After the fine, warm weather there was a wet spell. Throughout May it rained and it was cold. The sound of the mill-wheels and the rain made one feel sleepy and lazy; so did the shaking floor and smell of flour. My wife appeared twice a day in her short fur jacket and rubber boots, and she would invariably say the same thing: ‘Call this summer! It’s worse than October!’
We would drink tea together, cook porridge, or silently sit for hours on end waiting for the rain to stop. Once, when Stefan had gone to the fair, Masha spent the whole night at the mill. When we got up, there was no telling what the time was, as the whole sky was dark with rain clouds. But sleepy cocks crowed in Dubechnya and corncrakes cried in the meadow: it was still very, very early. I went down to the millpond with my wife and hauled out the fish-trap that Stefan had thrown in the previous evening while we were there. One large perch was floundering about and a crayfish angrily stretched its claws upwards.
‘Let them go,’ Masha said. ‘Let them be happy too…’
Because we had got up very early and then done nothing, the day seemed extremely long, the longest day in my life. Just before evening Stefan returned and I went back home to the big house.
‘Your father came today,’ Masha told me.
‘Where is he, then?’
‘He’s gone. I sent him away.’
Seeing me standing there in silence, she realized that I was sorry for Father.
‘One must be consistent. I didn’t let him in and I sent a message telling him not to trouble himself about coming again.’
A minute later I was through the gates and on my way to sort things out with Father. It was muddy, slippery and cold. For the first time since the wedding I felt sad, and the thought that I was not living as I should flashed through my brain, which was exhausted by the long, grey day. I felt worn out, and gradually I succumbed to faint-heartedness and inertia: I had no desire to move or to think. After a few steps I gave up and went home.
Dolzhikov was standing in the middle of the yard, in a leather coat with hood.
‘Where’s the furniture?’ he shouted. ‘There used to be beautiful empire-style things, paintings, vases, but they’ve collared the lot! To hell with her, I bought the estate with the furniture!’
Close by, Moisey, the general’s wife’s handyman, stood crumpling his cap. He was about twenty-five, thin, pock-marked and with small, cheeky eyes. One cheek was larger than the other, as if he’d been lying on it.
‘But, sir, you did buy it without the furniture,’ he said sheepishly. ‘I do remember that.’
‘Shut up!’ the engineer shouted, turning crimson and shaking all over. His voice echoed right round the garden.
XII
Whenever I worked in the garden or in the yard, Moisey would stand nearby, hands behind his back, idly and cheekily looking at me with those tiny eyes of his. This irritated me so much that I would leave what I was doing and go away.
Stefan revealed that this Moisey had been the general’s wife’s lover. I noticed that when people came for money they would first turn to Moisey, and once I saw a peasant, black all over (he was probably a charcoal-burner), prostrating himself in front of him. Sometimes after an exchange of whispers he would hand out the money himself, without telling the mistress, from which I deduced that he did business transactions of his own, on the quiet.
He used to go shooting right under the windows in the garden, filched food from our larders and took horses without our permission. We were furious, and Dubechnya didn’t seem to be ours at all. Masha would turn pale.
‘Do we have to live with this scum for another eighteen months?’ she would ask.
Ivan, the son of the general’s wife, was a guard on our railway. During the winter he had grown terribly thin and weak. Just one glass of vodka was enough to make him drunk and he felt the cold if he was out of the sun. He loathed and was ashamed of having to wear a guard’s uniform. But it was a profitable job, he thought, since he was able to steal candles and sell them. My new position aroused mixed feelings in him – amazement, envy and the vague hope that he too might be lucky. He followed Masha with admiring eyes, asked what I had for dinner these days. His gaunt, ugly face would take on a sickly, sad expression and he twiddled his fingers as though he could actually touch my good fortune.
‘Now, listen, Better-than-Nothing,’ he said fussily, constantly relighting his cigarette. He always made a terrible mess wherever he stood, since he wasted dozens of matches on one cigarette. ‘Listen, things have reached rock-bottom with me. The worst of it is, every tinpot little subaltern thinks he’s entitled to shout “Hey, you, guard! You over there!” I’ve just about had enough of hearing all sorts of things in trains, and now I can see that this life stinks! My mother’s ruined me! A doctor told me once in a train that if the parents have no morals, then the children turn out drunks or criminals. That’s what!’
Once he came staggering into the yard, his eyes wandering aimlessly, his breathing heavy. He laughed, cried and went on as if he was delirious. All I could make out in that gibberish was ‘Mother! Where’s my mother?’, which he said weeping, like a child that has lost its mother in a crowd. I led him into the garden and laid him down under a tree. All day and night Masha and I took it in turns to sit with him. He was in a bad state and Masha looked into his pale, wet face with revulsion.
‘Are we really going to have this scum living in our yard another eighteen months? That’s horrible, horrible!’ she said.
And how much distress the peasants caused us! How many deep disappointments we suffered from the very beginning, in the spring, when we yearned for happiness! My wife was building a school for them. I drew up a plan for a school for sixty boys. The local authorities approved it but advised us to build it at Kurilovka, that large village about two miles away. As it happened, the school at Kurilovka, which was attended by children from four villages, including Dubechnya, was old and cramped and one had to be careful walking over the rotten floorboards. At the end of March Masha was appointed trustee of the Kurilovka school, as she had wished, and at the beginning of April we arranged three meetings where we tried to convince the peasants that their school was cramped and old, and someone from the local council and the inspector of state schools came. They too tried to make the peasants see sense. After each meeting they surrounded us and asked for a barrel of vodka. We felt hot amongst all that crowd and were very soon exhausted. So we went home, feeling dissatisfied and rather embarrassed. In the end the peasants picked a site for the school and had to fetch all the building materials from the town on their own horses. The first Sunday after the spring wheat had been sown, carts left Kurilovka and Dubechnya to fetch bricks for the foundations. The men left as soon as it was light and came back late in the evening – drunk, and complaining what a rotten job it was.
As if to spite us, the cold rainy weather lasted the whole of May. The roads were thick with mud. After returning from town the carts usually entered our yard, and what a dreadful sight this was! A pot-bellied horse would appear at the gates, straddling its forelegs. Before coming into the yard it appeared to bow; then a wet, slimy-looking thirty-foot beam would slide in on a low cart. Wrapped up against the rain, his coat flaps tucked inside his belt, a peasant would stride along beside it, not looking where he was going, and walking straight through the puddles. Another cart laden with planks would appear, then a third carrying a beam, then a fourth. Gradually the space in front of the house would become choked with horses, beams and planks. With heads covered and clothes tucked up, the peasants – both the men and women – would look male volently at our windows, make a dreadful racket and demand that the lady of the house come out. The swearing was appalling. Moisey would stand to one side and seemed to be revelling in the ignominy of our position.
‘We don’t want
to do any more shifting!’ the peasants would shout. ‘We’re worn out! Let her go and fetch the stuff herself!’
Pale-faced and scared out of her wits at the thought that they might try and break into the house, Masha would send out the money for half a barrel. After that the noise would die down, and, one after the other, the long beams would trundle out of the yard again.
Whenever I went to the building-site my wife grew worried.
‘The peasants are in a nasty temper,’ she would say. ‘They might do something to you. Wait a moment, I’m coming with you.’
We would drive to Kurilovka together and there the carpenters would ask us for a tip. The timber frame was ready; it was time for laying the foundations, but the bricklayers didn’t turn up. The carpenters grumbled at the delay. When the bricklayers finally did turn up, they found that there was no sand – for some reason we’d forgotten this would be needed. The peasants took advantage of our desperate situation and asked for thirty copecks a load, although it wasn’t more than a few hundred yards from the site to the river, where the sand was taken from. And we needed more than five hundred loads. There was no end to the misunderstandings, swearing and cadging, which exasperated my wife. The foreman-bricklayer – an old man of seventy, by the name of Titus Petrov – would take her by the arm and say, ‘Look’ere! Just you bring me that sand and I’ll have ten men ’ere in two ticks and the job’ll be done in a couple of days. You see to it!’
The sand was brought; two days, four days, a week went by and still there was a gaping hole where the foundations were to be laid.
‘It’s enough to drive you insane!’ my wife said, terribly agitated. ‘What dreadful, really dreadful people!’
While all these arguments were going on, Viktor Ivanych came to see us. He brought some hampers of wine and savouries, took his time over his meal, then lay down on the terrace to sleep, snoring so loudly that the workmen shook their heads and said, ‘Now wotcher think of that!’
Masha was never pleased when he came. She didn’t trust him, but took his advice nonetheless. When he’d had his after-dinner nap, he would get up in a bad mood and say nasty things about the way we ran the house. Or he would say he was sorry that he’d bought Dubechnya, on which he’d lost so much money. At these moments poor Masha looked quite desperate. While she complained, he would yawn and say that the peasants needed a good thrashing. He called our marriage and life together a farce, a piece of irresponsible self-indulgence.
‘It’s not the first time she’s done something like this,’ he told me, referring to Masha. ‘Once she imagined she was an opera singer and ran away from me. I looked for her for two months and spent a thousand roubles on telegrams alone, my dear chap.’
He no longer called me ‘sectarian’ or ‘Mr Painter’ and he no longer approved of my living as a workman.
‘You’re a strange one, you are!’ he said. ‘You’re not normal! I’m not one for prophesying, but you’ll come to a bad end, you will!’
Masha slept badly at night and was always sitting at our bedroom window, deep in thought.
There was no more laughter at supper, no more of those endearingly funny faces. I felt wretched and when it rained every drop seemed to burrow its way into my heart. I was ready to fall on my knees before Masha and apologize for the weather. Whenever the peasants had a row in the yard, I felt that I was to blame for this as well. I would sit in one place for hours on end, just thinking what a wonderful person Masha was. I loved her passionately and everything she did or said captivated me. She had a liking for quiet, studious work and loved reading and studying for hours on end. Although she knew farming only from books, she amazed all of us with her knowledge. All the advice she gave us was always practical and was always put to good use. Besides this, she had such a fine character, such good taste and good humour – the good humour possessed usually only by very well-bred people.
For a woman like this, with a healthy, practical mind, the chaos in which we were living, with all its petty worries and squabbling, was a real ordeal. This was quite clear to me and I too could not sleep at night, as my brain was still active. Deeply affected by everything, I would toss and turn, not knowing what to do.
I used to gallop off to town to fetch books, papers, sweets and flowers for Masha. I would go fishing with Stefan and stood in the rain for hours on end, up to my neck in cold water, trying to bring variety to our table with a burbot. I would swallow my pride and request the peasants not to make a noise, treat them to vodka, bribe them and make various promises. There was no end to the silly things I did!
Finally the rain stopped and the earth dried out. I would rise at four in the morning and go out into the garden – here there were flowers sparkling with dew, the sounds of birds and insects – and not a cloud in the sky. The garden, the meadows and the river were all beautiful – and then I would remember the peasants, carts, the engineer! Masha and I would drive out into the fields in a racing-trap to look at the oats. She held the reins, with shoulders held high and the wind playing with her hair, while I sat behind.
‘Keep to the right!’ she would shout to passers-by.
‘You’re just like a coachman!’ I once told her.
‘That’s quite possible! After all, my grandfather’ (the engineer’s father) ‘was a coachman. Didn’t you know?’ she asked, turning round. And immediately she began to imitate the way coachmen sing and shout.
‘That’s great!’ I thought as I listened. ‘That’s great!’
And then I remembered the peasants, carts, the engineer…
XIII
Dr Blagovo arrived on a bicycle and my sister became a frequent visitor. Once again we talked about physical labour, progress and that mysterious Unknown awaiting mankind in the remote future. The doctor didn’t like farming, since it interfered with our discussions. Ploughing, reaping, grazing calves, he maintained, were not the right work for free men. In time people would delegate all these crude forms of the struggle for survival to animals and machines, while they would devote all their time to scientific research. My sister kept begging us to let her go home early, and if she stayed late or spent the night with us, there was terrible trouble.
‘God, what a child you are!’ Masha reproached her. ‘It’s really rather stupid!’
‘Yes, it is,’ my sister agreed. ‘I admit it. But what can I do if I can’t control myself? I always think I’m behaving badly.’
During haymaking my whole body ached, since I wasn’t used to the work. If I sat on the terrace in the evening chatting I would suddenly fall asleep and everyone would roar with laughter, wake me up and sit me down at the supper table. Even so, I would still be overcome by drowsiness and, as if half-dreaming, I would see lights, faces, plates. I would hear voices without understanding what they said – after that early morning start I had immediately picked up my scythe, or I’d gone off to the building-site and been working there all day long.
On holidays, when I stayed at home, I noticed that my wife and sister were hiding something from me and even seemed to be avoiding me. My wife was as tender with me as before, but she was harbouring some thoughts of her own that she did not wish to reveal to me. There was no doubt that she was getting increasingly annoyed with the peasants and the life here had become much more difficult for her. But she no longer complained to me. Nowadays she preferred talking to the doctor than to me and I couldn’t understand why.
It was the custom in our province, at haymaking and harvest-time, for the workers to come to the big house in the evenings for their vodka treat. Even the young girls would drink a glass. But we did not observe this custom. The reapers and peasant women would stand in our yard until late evening, waiting for some vodka, and then they left swearing. Masha would frown sternly the whole time and say nothing, or else she would whisper irritably to the doctor, ‘Savages! Barbarians!’
In the country, newcomers usually meet with an unfriendly, almost hostile reception, like new boys at school. And this was what we got. At fir
st they took us for stupid, simple-minded people who had bought the estate because we did not know what to do with our money. They just laughed at us. Peasants let their cattle graze in our wood, even in the garden; they drove our cows and horses to the village and then came asking for money to repair the damage they had done. The whole village would flock into our yard, noisily maintaining that, when we were cutting the hay, we had trespassed on some fields at some Bysheyevka or Semyonikha or other that did not belong to us. But as we were not yet sure of our exact boundaries we took their word for it and paid the fine. Subsequently it turned out that we had been in the right after all. They stripped lime bark off the trees in our wood. One profiteer from Dubechnya, a peasant trading in vodka without a licence, bribed our workers, and the whole bunch of them played the most dirty tricks on us. They replaced our new cartwheels with old, they made off with the horse collars we used for ploughing and sold them back to us, and so on. But worst of all was what happened at the Kurilovka building-site. The women there stole planks, bricks, tiles and iron at night. The village elder would search their places with witnesses and each one would be fined two roubles at a village meeting. Subsequently the money from the fines was spent on drinks for everyone in the village.
Whenever Masha found out about these things she would angrily tell the doctor or my sister, ‘What animals! It’s appalling, shocking!’
And more than once I heard her regretting that she had ever taken on the task of building a school.