Peasants and Other Stories

  “And are you sure she would have married you if you had not been rich?” asked Polina.

  “I’m not sure of anything,” said Laptev dejectedly. “Not of anything. I don’t understand anything. For God’s sake, Polina, don’t let us talk about it.”

  “Do you love her?”

  “Desperately.”

  A silence followed. She drank a fourth glass, while he paced up and down, thinking that by now his wife was probably having supper at the doctors’ club.

  “But is it possible to love without knowing why?” asked Polina, shrugging her shoulders. “No; it’s the promptings of animal passion! You are poisoned, intoxicated by that beautiful body, that reinheit! Go away from me; you are unclean! Go to her!”

  She brandished her hand at him, then took up his hat and hurled it at him. He put on his fur coat without speaking and went out, but she ran after him into the passage, clutched his arm above the elbow, and broke into sobs.

  “Hush, Polina! Don’t!” he said, and could not unclasp her fingers. “Calm yourself, I entreat you.”

  She shut her eyes and turned pale, and her long nose became an unpleasant waxy color like a corpse’s, and Laptev still could not unclasp her fingers. She had fainted. He lifted her up carefully, laid her on her bed, and sat by her for ten minutes till she came to herself. Her hands were cold, her pulse was weak and uneven.

  “Go home,” she said, opening her eyes. “Go away, or I shall begin howling again. I must take myself in hand.”

  When he came out, instead of going to the doctors’ club where his friends were expecting him, he went home. All the way home he was asking himself reproachfully why he had not settled down to married life with that woman who loved him so much, and was in reality his wife and friend. She was the one human being who was devoted to him; and, besides, would it not have been a grateful and worthy task to give happiness, peace, and a home to that proud, clever, overworked creature? Was it for him, he asked himself, to lay claim to youth and beauty, to that happiness which could not be, and which, as though in punishment or mockery, had kept him for the last three months in a state of gloom and oppression. The honeymoon was long over, and he still, absurd to say, did not know what sort of person his wife was. To her school friends and her father she wrote long letters of five sheets and was never at a loss for something to say to them, but to him she never spoke except about the weather or to tell him that dinner was ready, or that it was suppertime. When at night she said her lengthy prayers and then kissed her crosses and icons, he thought, watching her with hatred, “Here she’s praying. What’s she praying about? What about?” In his thoughts he showered insults on himself and her, telling himself that when he got into bed and took her into his arms, he was taking what he had paid for; but it was horrible. If only it had been a healthy, reckless, sinful woman; but here he had youth, piety, meekness, the pure eyes of innocence. . . . While they were engaged her piety had touched him; now the conventional definiteness of her views and convictions seemed to him a barrier, behind which the real truth could not be seen. Already everything in his married life was agonizing. When his wife, sitting beside him in the theater, sighed or laughed spontaneously, it was bitter to him that she enjoyed herself alone and would not share her delight with him. And it was remarkable that she was friendly with all his friends, and they all knew what she was like already, while he knew nothing about her and only moped and was dumbly jealous.

  When he got home Laptev put on his dressing gown and slippers and sat down in his study to read a novel. His wife was not at home. But within half an hour there was a ring at the hall door, and he heard the muffled footsteps of Pyotr running to open it. It was Yulia. She walked into the study in her fur coat, her cheeks rosy with the frost.

  “There’s a great fire in Pryesnya,” she said breathlessly. “There’s a tremendous glow. I’m going to see it with Konstantin Ivanovich.”

  “Well, do, dear!”

  The sight of her health, her freshness, and the childish horror in her eyes, reassured Laptev. He read for another half hour and went to bed.

  Next day Polina Nikolaevna sent to the warehouse two books she had borrowed from him, all his letters and his photographs; with them was a note consisting of one word—“basta.”

  8.

  Towards the end of October Nina Fyodorovna had had unmistakable symptoms of a relapse. There was a change in her face, and she grew rapidly thinner. In spite of acute pain she still imagined that she was getting better, and got up and dressed every morning as though she were well, and then lay on her bed, fully dressed, for the rest of the day. And towards the end she became very talkative. She would lie on her back and talk in a low voice, speaking with an effort and breathing painfully. She died suddenly under the following circumstances.

  It was a clear moonlight evening. In the street people were tobogganing in the fresh snow, and their clamor floated in at the window. Nina Fyodorovna was lying on her back in bed, and Sasha, who had no one to take turns with her now, was sitting beside her half asleep.

  “I don’t remember his father’s name,” Nina Fyodorovna was saying softly, “but his name was Ivan Kochevoi—a poor clerk. He was a sad drunkard, the Kingdom of Heaven be his! He used to come to us, and every month we used to give him a pound of sugar and two ounces of tea. And money, too, sometimes, of course. Yes. . . . And then, this is what happened. Our Kochevoi began drinking heavily and died, consumed by vodka. He left a little son, a boy of seven. Poor little orphan! . . . We took him and hid him in the clerk’s quarters, and he lived there for a whole year, without father’s knowing. And when father did see him, he only waved his hand and said nothing. When Kostya, the little orphan, was nine years old—by that time I was engaged to be married—I took him round to all the day schools. I went from one to the other, and no one would take him. And he cried. . . . ‘What are you crying for, little silly?’ I said. I took him to Razgulyai to the second school, where—God bless them for it!—they took him, and the boy began going every day on foot from Pyatnitsky Street to Razgulyai Street and back again. . . . Alyosha paid for him. . . . By God’s grace the boy got on, was good at his lessons, and turned out well. . . . He’s a lawyer now in Moscow, a friend of Alyosha’s, and so good in science. Yes, we had compassion on a fellow creature and took him into our house, and now, I daresay, he remembers us in his prayers. . . . Yes. . . .”

  Nina Fyodorovna spoke more and more slowly with long pauses, then after a brief silence she suddenly raised herself and sat up.

  “There’s something the matter with me . . . something seems wrong,” she said. “Lord have mercy on me! Oh, I can’t breathe!”

  Sasha knew that her mother would soon die; seeing now how suddenly her face looked drawn, she guessed that it was the end, and she was frightened.

  “Mother, you mustn’t!” she began sobbing. “You mustn’t.”

  “Run to the kitchen; let them go for Father. I am very ill indeed.”

  Sasha ran through all the rooms calling, but there were none of the servants in the house, and the only person she found was Lida asleep on a chest in the dining-room with her clothes on and without a pillow. Sasha ran into the yard just as she was, without her galoshes, and then into the street. On a bench at the gate her nurse was sitting watching the tobogganing. From beyond the river, where the tobogganing slope was, came the strains of a military band.

  “Nurse, Mother’s dying!” sobbed Sasha. “You must go for Father! . . .”

  The nurse went upstairs, and, glancing at the sick woman, thrust a lighted wax candle into her hand. Sasha rushed about in terror and besought someone to go for her father, then she put on a coat and a kerchief, and ran into the street. From the servants she knew already that her father had another wife and two children with whom he lived in Bazarny Street. She ran out of the gate and turned to the left, crying, and frightened of unknown people. She soon began to sink into the snow and grew numb with cold.

  She met an empty sledge, but she did not take
it: perhaps, she thought, the man would drive her out of town, rob her, and throw her into the cemetery (the servants had talked of such a case at tea). She went on and on, sobbing and panting with exhaustion. When she got into Bazarny Street, she inquired where Monsieur Panaurov lived. An unknown woman spent a long time directing her, and, seeing that she did not understand, took her by the hand and led her to a house of one story that stood back from the street. The door stood open. Sasha ran through the entry, along the corridor, and found herself at last in a warm, lighted room where her father was sitting by the samovar with a lady and two children. But by now she was unable to utter a word and could only sob. Panaurov understood.

  “Mother’s worse?” he asked. “Tell me, child: is Mother worse?”

  He was alarmed and sent for a sledge.

  When they got home, Nina Fyodorovna was sitting propped up with pillows, with a candle in her hand. Her face looked dark and her eyes were closed. Crowding in the doorway stood the nurse, the cook, the housemaid, a peasant called Prokofy, and a few persons of the humbler class, who were complete strangers. The nurse was giving them orders in a whisper, and they did not understand. Inside the room at the window stood Lida, with a pale and sleepy face, gazing severely at her mother.

  Panaurov took the candle out of Nina Fyodorovna’s hand, and, frowning contemptuously, flung it on the chest of drawers.

  “This is awful!” he said, and his shoulders quivered. “Nina, you must lie down,” he said affectionately. “Lie down, dear.”

  She looked at him but did not know him. . . . They laid her down on her back.

  When the priest and the doctor, Sergei Borisovich, arrived, the servants crossed themselves devoutly and prayed for her.

  “What a sad business!” said the doctor thoughtfully, coming out into the drawing-room. “Why, she was still young—not yet forty.”

  They heard the loud sobbing of the little girls. Panaurov, with a pale face and moist eyes, went up to the doctor and said in a faint, weak voice:

  “Do me a favor, my dear fellow. Send a telegram to Moscow. I’m not equal to it.”

  The doctor fetched the ink and wrote the following telegram to his daughter:

  MADAM PANAUROV DIED AT EIGHT O’CLOCK THIS EVENING. TELL YOUR HUSBAND: A MORTGAGED HOUSE FOR SALE IN DVORYANSKY STREET, NINE THOUSAND CASH. AUCTION ON TWELFTH. ADVISE HIM NOT MISS OPPORTUNITY.

  9.

  Laptev lived in one of the turnings out of Little Dmitrovka. Besides the big house facing the street, he rented also a two-storied lodge in the yard at the back of his friend Kochevoi, a lawyer’s assistant whom all the Laptevs called Kostya, because he had grown up under their eyes. Facing this lodge, stood another, also of two stories, inhabited by a French family consisting of a husband and wife and five daughters.

  There was a frost of twenty degrees. The windows were frozen over. Waking up in the morning, Kostya, with an anxious face, took twenty drops of a medicine; then, taking two dumbbells out of the bookcase, he did gymnastic exercises. He was tall and thin, with big reddish mustaches; but what was most noticeable in his appearance was the length of his legs.

  Pyotr, a middle-aged peasant in a reefer jacket and cotton breeches tucked into his high boots, brought in the samovar and made the tea.

  “It’s very nice weather now, Konstantin Ivanovich,” he said.

  “It is, but I tell you what, brother, it’s a pity we can’t get on, you and I, without such exclamations.”

  Pyotr sighed from politeness.

  “What are the little girls doing?” asked Kochevoi.

  “The priest has not come. Alexei Fyodorovich is giving them their lesson himself.”

  Kostya found a spot in the window that was not covered with frost and began looking through a field glass at the windows of the house where the French family lived.

  “There’s no seeing,” he said.

  Meanwhile Alexei Fyodorovich was giving Sasha and Lida a Scripture lesson below. For the last six weeks they had been living in Moscow and were installed with their governess in the lower story of the lodge. And three times a week a teacher from a school in the town, and a priest, came to give them lessons. Sasha was going through the New Testament and Lida was going through the Old. The time before Lida had been set the story up to Abraham to learn by heart.

  “And so Adam and Eve had two sons,” said Laptev. “Very good. But what were they called? Try to remember them!”

  Lida, still with the same severe face, gazed dumbly at the table. She moved her lips, but without speaking; and the elder girl, Sasha, looked into her face, frowning.

  “You know it very well, only you mustn’t be nervous,” said Laptev. “Come, what were Adam’s sons called?”

  “Abel and Canel,” Lida whispered.

  “Cain and Abel,” Laptev corrected her.

  A big tear rolled down Lida’s cheek and dropped on the book. Sasha looked down and turned red, and she, too, was on the point of tears. Laptev felt a lump in his throat and was so sorry for them he could not speak. He got up from the table and lighted a cigarette. At that moment Kochevoi came down the stairs with a paper in his hand. The little girls stood up, and, without looking at him, made curtseys.

  “For God’s sake, Kostya, give them their lessons,” said Laptev, turning to him. “I’m afraid I shall cry, too, and I have to go to the warehouse before dinner.”

  “All right.”

  Alexei Fyodorovich went away. Kostya, with a very serious face, sat down to the table and drew the Scripture history towards him.

  “Well,” he said, “where have you got to?”

  “She knows about the Flood,” said Sasha.

  “The Flood? All right. Let’s peg in at the Flood. Fire away about the Flood.” Kostya skimmed through a brief description of the Flood in the book, and said: “I must remark that there really never was a flood such as is described here. And there was no such person as Noah. Some thousands of years before the birth of Christ, there was an extraordinary inundation of the earth, and that’s not only mentioned in the Jewish Bible, but in the books of other ancient peoples: the Greeks, the Chaldeans, the Hindus. But whatever the inundation may have been, it couldn’t have covered the whole earth. It may have flooded the plains, but the mountains must have remained. You can read this book of course, but don’t put too much faith in it.”

  Tears trickled down Lida’s face again. She turned away and suddenly burst into such loud sobs that Kostya started and jumped up from his seat in great confusion.

  “I want to go home,” she said, “to Papa and to Nurse.”

  Sasha cried too. Kostya went upstairs to his own room and spoke on the telephone to Yulia Sergeyevna.

  “My dear soul,” he said, “the little girls are crying again; there’s no doing anything with them.”

  Yulia Sergeyevna ran across from the big house in her indoor dress, with only a knitted shawl over her shoulders, and chilled through by the frost, began comforting the children.

  “Do believe me, do believe me,” she said in an imploring voice, hugging first one and then the other. “Your papa’s coming today; he has sent a telegram. You’re grieving for Mother, and I grieve too. My heart’s torn, but what can we do? We must bow to God’s will!”

  When they left off crying, she wrapped them up and took them out for a drive. They stopped near the Iverskoi chapel, put up candles at the shrine, and, kneeling down, prayed. On the way back they went in Filippov’s and had cakes sprinkled with poppy seeds.

  The Laptevs had dinner between two and three. Pyotr handed the dishes. This Pyotr waited on the family, and by day ran to the post, to the warehouse, to the law courts for Kostya; he spent his evenings making cigarettes, ran to open the door at night, and before five o’clock in the morning was up lighting the stoves, and no one knew where he slept. He was very fond of opening seltzer-water bottles and did it easily, without a bang and without spilling a drop.

  “With God’s blessing,” said Kostya, drinking off a glass of vodka before the
soup.

  At first Yulia Sergeyevna did not like Kostya; his bass voice, his phrases such as “Landed him one on the beak,” “filth,” “produce the samovar,” etc., his habit of clinking glasses and making sentimental speeches seemed to her trivial. But as she got to know him better, she began to feel very much at home with him. He was open with her; he liked talking to her in a low voice in the evening and even gave her novels of his own composition to read, though these had been kept a secret even from such friends as Laptev and Yartsev. She read these novels and praised them, so that she might not disappoint him, and he was delighted because he hoped sooner or later to become a distinguished author.

  In his novels he described nothing but country-house life, though he had only seen the country on rare occasions when visiting friends at a summer villa and had only been in a real country house once in his life, when he had been to Volokolamsk on law business. He avoided any love interest as though he were ashamed of it; he put in frequent descriptions of nature, and in them was fond of using such expressions as, “the capricious lines of the mountains, the miraculous forms of the clouds, the harmony of mysterious rhythms. . . .” His novels had never been published, and this he attributed to the censorship.

  He liked the duties of a lawyer, but yet he considered that his most important pursuit was not the law but these novels. He believed that he had a subtle, aesthetic temperament, and he always had leanings towards art. He neither sang nor played on any musical instrument, and was absolutely without an ear for music, but he attended all the symphony and philharmonic concerts, got up concerts for charitable objects, and made the acquaintance of singers. . . .

  They used to talk at dinner.

  “It’s a strange thing,” said Laptev, “my Fyodor took my breath away again! He said we must find out the date of the centenary of our firm, so as to try and get raised to noble rank; and he said it quite seriously. What can be the matter with him? I confess I begin to feel worried about him.”