Peasants and Other Stories

  “Listen, Better-than-nothing,” he said fussily, relighting his cigarette at every instant; there was always a little where he stood, for he wasted dozens of matches lighting one cigarette. “Listen, my life now is the nastiest possible. The worst of it is any subaltern can shout: ‘Hi, there, guard!’ I have overheard all sorts of things in the train, my boy, and do you know, I have learned that life’s a beastly thing! My mother has been the ruin of me! A doctor in the train told me that if parents are immoral, their children are drunkards or criminals. Think of that!”

  Once he came into the yard, staggering; his eyes gazed about blankly, his breathing was labored; he laughed and cried and babbled as though in a high fever, and the only words I could catch in his muddled talk were, “My mother! Where’s my mother?” which he uttered with a wail like a child who has lost his mother in a crowd. I led him into our garden and laid him down under a tree, and Masha and I took turns to sit by him all that day and all night. He was very sick, and Masha looked with aversion at his pale, wet face, and said:

  “Is it possible these reptiles will go on living another year in our yard? It’s awful! It’s awful!”

  And how many mortifications the peasants caused us! How many bitter disappointments in those early days in the spring months, when we so longed to be happy. My wife built a school. I drew a plan of a school for sixty boys, and the Zemstvo Board approved of it but advised us to build the school at Kurilovka, the big village which was only two miles from us. Moreover, the school at Kurilovka in which children—from four villages, our Dubechnya being one of the number—were taught, was old and too small, and the floor was scarcely safe to walk upon. At the end of March, at Masha’s wish, she was appointed guardian of the Kurilovka school, and at the beginning of April we three times summoned the village assembly and tried to persuade the peasants that their school was old and overcrowded, and that it was essential to build a new one. A member of the Zemstvo Board and the inspector of peasant schools came, and they, too, tried to persuade them. After each meeting the peasants surrounded us, begging for a bucket of vodka; we were hot in the crowd; we were soon exhausted and returned home dissatisfied and a little ill at ease. In the end the peasants set apart a plot of ground for the school and were obliged to bring all the building material from the town with their own horses. And the very first Sunday after the spring corn was sown carts set off from Kurilovka and Dubechnya to fetch bricks for the foundations. They set off as soon as it was light and came back late in the evening; the peasants were drunk and said they were worn out.

  As ill luck would have it, the rain and the cold persisted all through May. The road was in an awful state: it was deep in mud. The carts usually drove into our yard when they came back from the town—and what a horrible ordeal it was. A potbellied horse would appear at the gate, setting its front legs wide apart; it would stumble forward before coming into the yard; a beam, nine yards long, wet and slimy-looking, crept in on a wagon. Beside it, muffled up against the rain, strode a peasant with the skirts of his coat tucked up in his belt, not looking where he was going, but stepping through the puddles. Another cart would appear with boards, then a third with a beam, a fourth . . . and the space before our house was gradually crowded up with horses, beams, and planks. Men and women, with their heads muffled and their skirts tucked up, would stare angrily at our windows, make an uproar, and clamor for the mistress to come out to them; coarse oaths were audible. Meanwhile Moisei stood at one side, and we fancied he was enjoying our discomfiture.

  “We are not going to cart any more,” the peasants would shout. “We are worn out! Let her go and get the stuff herself.”

  Masha, pale and flustered, expecting every minute that they would break into the house, would send them out a half pail of vodka; after that the noise would subside and the long beams, one after another, would crawl slowly out of the yard.

  When I was setting off to see the building my wife was worried and said:

  “The peasants are spiteful; I only hope they won’t do you a mischief. Wait a minute, I’ll come with you.”

  We drove to Kurilovka together, and there the carpenters asked us for a drink. The framework of the house was ready. It was time to lay the foundation, but the masons had not come; this caused delay, and the carpenters complained. And when at last the masons did come, it appeared that there was no sand; it had been somehow overlooked that it would be needed. Taking advantage of our helpless position, the peasants demanded thirty kopecks for each cartload, though the distance from the building to the river where they got the sand was less than a quarter of a mile, and more than five hundred cartloads were found to be necessary. There was no end to the misunderstandings, swearing, and importunity; my wife was indignant, and the foreman of the masons, Tit Petrov, an old man of seventy, took her by the arm, and said:

  “You look here! You look here! You only bring me the sand; I set ten men on at once, and in two days it will be done! You look here!”

  But they brought the sand and two days passed, and four, and a week, and instead of the promised foundation there was still a yawning hole.

  “It’s enough to drive one out of one’s senses,” said my wife, in distress. “What people! What people!”

  In the midst of these disorderly doings the engineer arrived; he brought with him parcels of wine and savories, and after a prolonged meal lay down for a nap in the veranda and snored so loudly that the laborers shook their heads and said: “Well!”

  Masha was not pleased at his coming; she did not trust him, though at the same time she asked his advice. When, after sleeping too long after dinner, he got up in a bad humor and said unpleasant things about our management of the place, or expressed regret that he had bought Dubechnya, which had already been a loss to him, poor Masha’s face wore an expression of misery. She would complain to him, and he would yawn and say that the peasants ought to be flogged.

  He called our marriage and our life a farce and said it was a caprice, a whim.

  “She has done something of the sort before,” he said about Masha. “She once fancied herself a great opera singer and left me; I was looking for her for two months, and, my dear soul, I spent a thousand rubles on telegrams alone.”

  He no longer called me a dissenter or Monsieur Painter, and did not as in the past express approval of my living like a workman, but said:

  “You are a strange person! You are not a normal person! I won’t venture to prophesy, but you will come to a bad end!”

  And Masha slept badly at night and was always sitting at our bedroom window thinking. There was no laughter at supper now, no charming grimaces. I was wretched, and when it rained every drop that fell seemed to pierce my heart, like small shot, and I felt ready to fall on my knees before Masha and apologize for the weather. When the peasants made a noise in the yard I felt guilty also. For hours at a time I sat still in one place, thinking of nothing but what a splendid person Masha was, what a wonderful person. I loved her passionately, and I was fascinated by everything she did, everything she said. She had a bent for quiet, studious pursuits; she was fond of reading for hours together, of studying. Although her knowledge of farming was only from books she surprised us all by what she knew; and ever piece of advice she gave was of value; not one was ever thrown away; and, with all that, what nobility, what taste, what graciousness, that graciousness which is only found in well-educated people.

  To this woman, with her sound, practical intelligence, the disorderly surroundings with petty cares and sordid anxieties in which we were living now were an agony: I saw that and could not sleep at night; my brain worked feverishly and I had a lump in my throat. I rushed about not knowing what to do.

  I galloped to the town and brought Masha books, newspapers, sweets, flowers; with Stepan I caught fish, wading for hours up to my neck in the cold water in the rain to catch eelpout to vary our fare; I demeaned myself to beg the peasants not to make a noise; I plied them with vodka, bought them off, made all sorts of promises. And how m
any other foolish things I did!

  At last the rain ceased, the earth dried. One would get up at four o’clock in the morning; one would go out into the garden—where there was dew sparkling on the flowers, the twitter of birds, the hum of insects, not one cloud in the sky; and the garden, the meadows, and the river were so lovely, yet there were memories of the peasants, of their carts, of the engineer. Masha and I drove out together in the racing droshky to the fields to look at the oats. She used to drive, I sat behind; her shoulders were raised and the wind played with her hair.

  “Keep to the right!” she shouted to those she met.

  “You are like a sledge driver,” I said to her one day.

  “Maybe! Why, my grandfather, the engineer’s father, was a sledge driver. Didn’t you know that?” she asked, turning to me, and at once she mimicked the way sledge drivers shout and sing.

  “And thank God for that,” I thought as I listened to her. “Thank God.”

  And again memories of the peasants, of the carts, of the engineer . . .

  13.

  Dr. Blagovo arrived on his bicycle. My sister began coming often. Again there were conversations about manual labor, about progress, about a mysterious millennium awaiting mankind in the remote future. The doctor did not like our farm-work because it interfered with arguments, and said that plowing, reaping, grazing calves were unworthy of a free man, and all these coarse forms of the struggle for existence men would in time relegate to animals and machines, while they would devote themselves exclusively to scientific investigation. My sister kept begging them to let her go home earlier, and if she stayed on till late in the evening, or spent the night with us, there would be no end to the agitation.

  “Good heavens, what a baby you are still!” said Masha reproachfully. “It is positively absurd.”

  “Yes, it is absurd,” my sister agreed, “I know it’s absurd; but what is to be done if I haven’t the strength to get over it? I keep feeling as though I were doing wrong.”

  At haymaking I ached all over from the unaccustomed labor; in the evening, sitting on the veranda and talking with the others, I suddenly dropped asleep, and they laughed aloud at me. They waked me up and made me sit down to supper; I was overpowered with drowsiness and I saw the lights, the faces, and the plates as it were in a dream, heard the voices, but did not understand them. And getting up early in the morning, I took up the scythe at once, or went to the building and worked hard all day.

  When I remained at home on holidays I noticed that my sister and Masha were concealing something from me and even seemed to be avoiding me. My wife was tender to me as before, but she had thoughts of her own apart, which she did not share with me. There was no doubt that her exasperation with the peasants was growing, the life was becoming more and more distasteful to her, and yet she did not complain to me. She talked to the doctor now more readily than she did to me, and I did not understand why it was so.

  It was the custom in our province at haymaking and harvest time for the laborers to come to the manor house in the evening and be regaled with vodka; even young girls drank a glass. We did not keep up this practice; the mowers and the peasant women stood about in our yard till late in the evening expecting vodka and then departed abusing us. And all the time Masha frowned grimly and said nothing, or murmured to the doctor with exasperation: “Savages! Pechenyegs!”

  In the country newcomers are met ungraciously, almost with hostility, as they are at school. And we were received in this way. At first we were looked upon as stupid, silly people, who had bought an estate simply because we did not know what to do with our money. We were laughed at. The peasants grazed their cattle in our wood and even in our garden; they drove away our cows and horses to the village and then demanded money for the damage done by them. They came in whole companies into our yard and loudly clamored that at the mowing we had cut some piece of land that did not belong to us; and as we did not yet know the boundaries of our estate very accurately, we took their word for it and paid damages. Afterwards it turned out that there had been no mistake at the mowing. They barked the lime trees in our wood. One of the Dubechnya peasants, a regular shark, who did a trade in vodka without a license, bribed our laborers and in collaboration with them cheated us in a most treacherous way. They took the new wheels off our carts and replaced them with old ones, stole our plowing harness and actually sold them to us, and so on. But what was most mortifying of all was what happened at the building; the peasant women stole by night boards, bricks, tiles, pieces of iron. The village elder with witnesses made a search in their huts; the village meeting fined them two rubles each, and afterwards this money was spent on drink by the whole commune.

  When Masha heard about this, she would say to the doctor or my sister indignantly:

  “What beasts! It’s awful! awful!”

  And I heard her more than once express regret that she had ever taken it into her head to build the school.

  “You must understand,” the doctor tried to persuade her, “that if you build this school and do good in general, it’s not for the sake of the peasants, but in the name of culture, in the name of the future; and the worse the peasants are the more reason for building the school. Understand that!”

  But there was a lack of conviction in his voice, and it seemed to me that both he and Masha hated the peasants.

  Masha often went to the mill, taking my sister with her, and they both said, laughing, that they went to have a look at Stepan, he was so handsome. Stepan, it appeared, was torpid and taciturn only with men; in feminine society his manners were free and easy, and he talked incessantly. One day, going down to the river to bathe, I accidentally overheard a conversation. Masha and Kleopatra, both in white dresses, were sitting on the bank in the spreading shade of a willow, and Stepan was standing by them with his hands behind his back, and was saying:

  “Are peasants men? They are not men, but, asking your pardon, wild beasts, impostors. What life has a peasant? Nothing but eating and drinking; all he cares for is victuals to be cheaper and swilling liquor at the tavern like a fool; and there’s no conversation, no manners, no formality, nothing but ignorance! He lives in filth, his wife lives in filth, and his children live in filth. What he stands up in, he lies down to sleep in; he picks the potatoes out of the soup with his fingers; he drinks kvass with a cockroach in it and doesn’t bother to blow it away!”

  “It’s their poverty, of course,” my sister put in.

  “Poverty? There is want to be sure, there’s different sorts of want, madam. If a man is in prison, or let us say blind or crippled, that really is trouble I wouldn’t wish anyone, but if a man’s free and has all his senses, if he has his eyes and his hands and his strength and God, what more does he want? It’s cockering themselves, and it’s ignorance, madam, it’s not poverty. If you, let us suppose, good gentlefolk, by your education, wish out of kindness to help him, he will drink away your money in his low way; or, what’s worse, he will open a drinkshop, and with your money start robbing the people. You say poverty, but does the rich peasant live better? He, too, asking your pardon, lives like a swine: coarse, loudmouthed, cudgel-headed, broader than he is long, fat, red-faced mug, I’d like to swing my fist and send him flying, the scoundrel. There’s Larion, another rich one at Dubechnya, and I bet he strips the bark off your trees as much as any poor one; and he is a foul-mouthed fellow; his children are the same, and when he has had a drop too much he’ll topple with his nose in a puddle and sleep there. They are all a worthless lot, madam. If you live in a village with them it is like hell. It has stuck in my teeth, that village has, and thank the Lord, the King of Heaven, I’ve plenty to eat and clothes to wear, I served out my time in the dragoons, I was village elder for three years, and now I am a free Cossack, I live where I like. I don’t want to live in the village, and no one has the right to force me. They say—my wife. They say you are bound to live in your cottage with your wife. But why so? I am not her hired man.”

  “Tell me, Stepan, d
id you marry for love?” asked Masha.

  “Love among us in the village!” answered Stepan, and he gave a laugh. “Properly speaking, madam, if you care to know, this is my second marriage. I am not a Kurilovka man, I am from Zalegoshcho, but afterwards I was taken into Kurilovka when I married. You see my father did not want to divide the land among us. There were five of us brothers. I took my leave and went to another village to live with my wife’s family, but my first wife died when she was young.”

  “What did she die of?”

  “Of foolishness. She used to cry and cry and cry for no reason, and so she pined away. She was always drinking some sort of herbs to make her better-looking, and I suppose she damaged her inside. And my second wife is a Kurilovka woman too, there is nothing in her. She’s a village woman, a peasant woman, and nothing more. I was taken in when they plighted me to her. I thought she was young and fair-skinned, and that they lived in a clean way. Her mother was just like a Flagellant and she drank coffee, and the chief thing, to be sure, they were clean in their ways. So I married her, and next day we sat down to dinner; I bade my mother-in-law give me a spoon, and she gives me a spoon, and I see her wipe it out with her finger. So much for you, thought I; nice sort of cleanliness yours is. I lived a year with them and then I went away. I might have married a girl from the town,” he went on after a pause. “They say a wife is a helpmate to her husband. What do I want with a helpmate? I help myself; I’d rather she talked to me, and not clack, clack, clack, but circumstantially, feelingly. What is life without good conversation?”