Peasants and Other Stories

“I am sure you are aching all over after your work, and you come to the door with me,” she said as they went down the stairs. “Go home.”

  But he did not catch her words. When they came out into the street, he ran on ahead, unfastened the cover of the sledge, and, helping Anna Akimovna in, said:

  “I wish you a happy Christmas!”

  2. CHRISTMAS MORNING

  “They have left off ringing ever so long! It’s dreadful; you won’t be there before the service is over! Get up!”

  “Two horses are racing, racing . . .” said Anna Akimovna, and she woke up; before her, candle in hand, stood her maid, red-haired Masha. “Well, what is it?”

  “Service is over already,” said Masha with despair. “I have called you three times! Sleep till evening for me, but you told me yourself to call you!”

  Anna Akimovna raised herself on her elbow and glanced towards the window. It was still quite dark outside, and only the lower edge of the window frame was white with snow. She could hear a low, mellow chime of bells; it was not the parish church, but somewhere further away. The watch on the little table showed three minutes past six.

  “Very well, Masha . . . In three minutes . . .” said Anna Akimovna in an imploring voice, and she snuggled under the bedclothes.

  She imagined the snow at the front door, the sledge, the dark sky, the crowd in the church, and the smell of juniper, and she felt dread at the thought; but all the same, she made up her mind that she would get up at once and go to early service. And while she was warm in bed and struggling with sleep—which seems, as though to spite one, particularly sweet when one ought to get up—and while she had visions of an immense garden on a mountain and then Gushchin’s Buildings, she was worried all the time by the thought that she ought to get up that very minute and go to church.

  But when she got up it was quite light, and it turned out to be half-past nine. There had been a heavy fall of snow in the night; the trees were clothed in white, and the air was particularly light, transparent, and tender, so that when Anna Akimovna looked out of the window her first impulse was to draw a deep, deep breath. And when she had washed, a relic of faraway childish feelings—joy that today was Christmas—suddenly stirred within her; after that she felt lighthearted, free and pure in soul, as though her soul, too, had been washed or plunged in the white snow. Masha came in, dressed up and tightly laced, and wished her a happy Christmas; then she spent a long time combing her mistress’s hair and helping her to dress. The fragrance and feeling of the new, gorgeous, splendid dress, its faint rustle, and the smell of fresh scent excited Anna Akimovna.

  “Well, it’s Christmas,” she said gaily to Masha. “Now we will try our fortunes.”

  “Last year I was to marry an old man. It turned up three times the same.”

  “Well, God is merciful.”

  “Well, Anna Akimovna, what I think is, rather than neither one thing nor the other, I’d marry an old man,” said Masha mournfully, and she heaved a sigh. “I am turned twenty; it’s no joke.”

  Everyone in the house knew that red-haired Masha was in love with Mishenka, the footman, and this genuine, passionate, hopeless love had already lasted three years.

  “Come, don’t talk nonsense,” Anna Akimovna consoled her. “I am going on for thirty, but I am still meaning to marry a young man.”

  While his mistress was dressing, Mishenka, in a new swallow-tail and polished boots, walked about the hall and drawing-room and waited for her to come out, to wish her a happy Christmas. He had a peculiar walk, stepping softly and delicately; looking at his feet, his hands, and the bend of his head, one might imagine that he was not simply walking, but learning to dance the first figure of a quadrille. In spite of his fine velvety mustache and handsome, rather flashy appearance, he was steady, prudent, and devout as an old man. He said his prayers, bowing down to the ground, and liked burning incense in his room. He respected people of wealth and rank and had a reverence for them; he despised poor people, and all who came to ask favors of any kind, with all the strength of his cleanly flunkey soul. Under his starched shirt he wore a flannel, winter and summer alike, being very careful of his health; his ears were plugged with cotton wool.

  When Anna Akimovna crossed the hall with Masha, he bent his head downwards a little and said in his agreeable, honeyed voice:

  “I have the honor to congratulate you, Anna Akimovna, on the most solemn feast of the birth of our Lord.”

  Anna Akimovna gave him five rubles, while poor Masha was numb with ecstasy. His holiday getup, his attitude, his voice, and what he said impressed her by their beauty and elegance; as she followed her mistress she could think of nothing, could see nothing; she could only smile, first blissfully and then bitterly. The upper story of the house was called the best or visitors’ half, while the name of the business part—old people’s or simply women’s part—was given to the rooms on the lower story where Aunt Tatyana Ivanovna kept house. In the upper part the gentry and educated visitors were entertained; in the lower story, simpler folk and the aunt’s personal friends. Handsome, plump, and healthy, still young and fresh, and feeling she had on a magnificent dress which seemed to her to diffuse a sort of radiance all about her, Anna Akimovna went down to the lower story. Here she was met with reproaches for forgetting God now that she was so highly educated, for sleeping too late for the service, and for not coming downstairs to break the fast, and they all clasped their hands and exclaimed with perfect sincerity that she was lovely, wonderful; and she believed it, laughed, kissed them, gave one a ruble, another three or five according to their position. She liked being downstairs. Wherever one looked there were shrines, icons, little lamps, portraits of ecclesiastical personages—the place smelled of monks; there was a rattle of knives in the kitchen, and already a smell of something savory, exceedingly appetizing, was pervading all the rooms. The yellow-painted floors shone, and from the doors narrow rugs with bright blue stripes ran like little paths to the icon corner, and the sunshine was simply pouring in at the windows.

  In the dining-room some old women, strangers, were sitting; in Varvarushka’s room, too, there were old women, and with them a deaf and dumb girl who seemed abashed about something and kept saying, “Bli, bli! . . .” Two skinny-looking little girls who had been brought out of the orphanage for Christmas came up to kiss Anna Akimovna’s hand, and stood before her transfixed with admiration of her splendid dress; she noticed that one of the girls squinted, and in the midst of her lighthearted holiday mood she felt a sick pang at her heart at the thought that young men would despise the girl and that she would never marry. In the cook Agafya’s room, five huge peasants in new shirts were sitting round the samovar; these were not workmen from the factory, but relations of the cook. Seeing Anna Akimovna, all the peasants jumped up from their seats and, from regard for decorum, ceased munching, though their mouths were full. The cook Stepan, in a white cap, with a knife in his hand, came into the room and gave her his greetings; porters in high felt boots came in, and they, too, offered their greetings. The water carrier peeped in with icicles on his beard, but did not venture to come in.

  Anna Akimovna walked through the rooms, followed by her retinue—the aunt, Varvarushka, Nikandrovna, the sewing-maid Marfa Petrovna, and the downstairs Masha. Varvarushka—a tall, thin, slender woman, taller than anyone in the house, dressed all in black, smelling of cypress and coffee—crossed herself in each room before the icon, bowing down from the waist. And whenever one looked at her one was reminded that she had already prepared her shroud and that lottery tickets were hidden away by her in the same box.

  “Anyutinka, be merciful at Christmas,” she said, opening the door into the kitchen. “Forgive him, bless the man! Have done with it!”

  The coachman Pantelei, who had been dismissed for drunkenness in November, was on his knees in the middle of the kitchen. He was a good-natured man, but he used to be unruly when he was drunk, and could not go to sleep, but persisted in wandering about the buildings and shouting in a
threatening voice, “I know all about it!” Now from his beefy and bloated face and from his bloodshot eyes it could be seen that he had been drinking continually from November till Christmas.

  “Forgive me, Anna Akimovna,” he brought out in a hoarse voice, striking his forehead on the floor and showing his bull-like neck.

  “It was Auntie dismissed you; ask her.”

  “What about Auntie?” said her aunt, walking into the kitchen, breathing heavily; she was very stout, and on her bosom one might have stood a tray of teacups and a samovar. “What about Auntie now? You are mistress here, give your own orders; though these rascals might be all dead for all I care. Come, get up, you hog!” she shouted at Pantelei, losing patience. “Get out of my sight! It’s the last time I forgive you, but if you transgress again—don’t ask for mercy!”

  Then they went into the dining-room to coffee. But they had hardly sat down when the downstairs Masha rushed headlong in, saying with horror, “The singers!” And ran back again. They heard someone blowing his nose, a low bass cough, and footsteps that sounded like horses’ iron-shod hoofs tramping about the entry near the hall. For half a minute all was hushed. . . . The singers burst out so suddenly and loudly that everyone started. While they were singing, the priest from the almshouses, with the deacon and the sexton, arrived. Putting on the stole, the priest slowly said that when they were ringing for matins it was snowing and not cold, but that the frost was sharper towards morning, God bless it! and now there must be twenty degrees of frost.

  “Many people maintain, though, that winter is healthier than summer,” said the deacon; then immediately assumed an austere expression and chanted after the priest, “Thy Birth, O Christ our Lord . . .”

  Soon the priest from the workmen’s hospital came with the deacon, then the Sisters from the hospital, children from the orphanage, and then singing could be heard almost uninterruptedly. They sang, had lunch, and went away.

  About twenty men from the factory came to offer their Christmas greetings. They were only the foremen, mechanicians, and their assistants, the pattern makers, the accountant, and so on—all of good appearance, in new black coats. They were all first-rate men, as it were picked men; each one knew his value—that is, knew that if he lost his berth today, people would be glad to take him on at another factory. Evidently they liked Auntie, as they behaved freely in her presence and even smoked, and when they had all trooped in to have something to eat, the accountant put his arm round her immense waist. They were free and easy, perhaps, partly also because Varvarushka, who under the old masters had wielded great power and had kept watch over the morals of the clerks, had now no authority whatever in the house; and perhaps because many of them still remembered the time when Auntie Tatyana Ivanovna, whose brothers kept a strict hand over her, had been dressed like a simple peasant woman like Agafya, and when Anna Akimovna used to run about the yard near the factory buildings and every one used to call her Anyutya.

  The foremen ate, talked, and kept looking with amazement at Anna Akimovna; how she had grown up and how handsome she had become! But this elegant girl, educated by governesses and teachers, was a stranger to them; they could not understand her, and they instinctively kept closer to Auntie, who called them by their names, continually pressed them to eat and drink, and, clicking glasses with them, had already drunk two wineglasses of rowanberry wine with them. Anna Akimovna was always afraid of their thinking her proud, an upstart, or a crow in peacock’s feathers; and now while the foremen were crowding round the food, she did not leave the dining-room, but took part in the conversation. She asked Pimenov, her acquaintance of the previous day:

  “Why have you so many clocks in your room?”

  “I mend clocks,” he answered. “I take the work up between times, on holidays, or when I can’t sleep.”

  “So if my watch goes wrong I can bring it to you to be repaired?” Anna Akimovna asked, laughing.

  “To be sure, I will do it with pleasure,” said Pimenov, and there was an expression of tender devotion in his face, when, not herself knowing why, she unfastened her magnificent watch from its chain and handed it to him; he looked at it in silence and gave it back. “To be sure, I will do it with pleasure,” he repeated. “I don’t mend watches now. My eyes are weak, and the doctors have forbidden me to do fine work. But for you I can make an exception.”

  “Doctors talk nonsense,” said the accountant. They all laughed. “Don’t you believe them,” he went on, flattered by the laughing; “last year a tooth flew out of a cylinder and hit old Kalmykov such a crack on the head that you could see his brains, and the doctor said he would die; but he is alive and working to this day, only he has taken to stammering since that mishap.”

  “Doctors do talk nonsense, they do, but not so much,” sighed Auntie. “Pyotr Andreyich, poor dear, lost his sight. Just like you, he used to work day in day out at the factory near the hot furnace, and he went blind. The eyes don’t like heat. But what are we talking about?” she said, rousing herself. “Come and have a drink. My best wishes for Christmas, my dears. I never drink with anyone else, but I drink with you, sinful woman as I am. Please God!”

  Anna Akimovna fancied that after yesterday Pimenov despised her as a philanthropist but was fascinated by her as a woman. She looked at him and thought that he behaved very charmingly and was nicely dressed. It is true that the sleeves of his coat were not quite long enough, and the coat itself seemed short-waisted, and his trousers were not wide and fashionable, but his tie was tied carefully and with taste and was not as gaudy as the others’. And he seemed to be a good-natured man, for he ate submissively whatever Auntie put on his plate. She remembered how black he had been the day before, and how sleepy, and the thought of it for some reason touched her.

  When the men were preparing to go, Anna Akimovna put out her hand to Pimenov. She wanted to ask him to come in sometimes to see her, without ceremony, but she did not know how to—her tongue would not obey her; and that they might not think she was attracted by Pimenov, she shook hands with his companions, too.

  Then the boys from the school of which she was a patroness came. They all had their heads closely cropped and all wore gray blouses of the same pattern. The teacher—a tall, beardless young man with patches of red on his face—was visibly agitated as he formed the boys into rows; the boys sang in tune, but with harsh, disagreeable voices. The manager of the factory, Nazarich, a bald, sharp-eyed Old Believer, could never get on with the teachers, but the one who was now anxiously waving his hands he despised and hated, though he could not have said why. He behaved rudely and condescendingly to the young man, kept back his salary, meddled with the teaching, and had finally tried to dislodge him by appointing, a fortnight before Christmas, as porter to the school, a drunken peasant, a distant relation of his wife, who disobeyed the teacher and said rude things to him before the boys.

  Anna Akimovna was aware of all this, but she could be of no help, for she was afraid of Nazarich herself. Now she wanted at least to be very nice to the schoolmaster, to tell him she was very much pleased with him; but when after the singing he began apologizing for something in great confusion, and Auntie began to address him familiarly as she drew him without ceremony to the table, she felt, for some reason, bored and awkward, and, giving orders that the children should be given sweets, went upstairs.

  “In reality there is something cruel in these Christmas customs,” she said a little while afterwards, as it were to herself, looking out of window at the boys, who were flocking from the house to the gates and, shivering with cold, putting their coats on as they ran. “At Christmas one wants to rest, to sit at home with one’s own people, and the poor boys, the teacher, and the clerks and foremen are obliged for some reason to go through the frost, then to offer their greetings, show their respect, be put to confusion . . .”

  Mishenka, who was standing at the door of the drawing-room and overheard this, said:

  “It has not come from us, and it will not end with us. Of cour
se, I am not an educated man, Anna Akimovna, but I do understand that the poor must always respect the rich. It is well said, ‘God marks the rogue.’ In prisons, night refuges, and pothouses you never see any but the poor, while decent people, you may notice, are always rich. It has been said of the rich, ‘Deep calls to deep.’ ”

  “You always express yourself so tediously and incomprehensibly,” said Anna Akimovna, and she walked to the other end of the big drawing-room.

  It was only just past eleven. The stillness of the big room, only broken by the singing that floated up from below, made her yawn. The bronzes, the albums, and the pictures on the walls, representing a ship at sea, cows in a meadow, and views of the Rhine, were so absolutely stale that her eyes simply glided over them without observing them. The holiday mood was already growing tedious. As before, Anna Akimovna felt that she was beautiful, good-natured, and wonderful, but now it seemed to her that that was of no use to anyone; it seemed to her that she did not know for whom and for what she had put on this expensive dress, too, and, as always happened on all holidays, she began to be fretted by loneliness and the persistent thought that her beauty, her health, and her wealth were a mere cheat, since she was not wanted, was of no use to anyone, and nobody loved her. She walked through all the rooms, humming and looking out of window; stopping in the drawing-room, she could not resist beginning to talk to Mishenka.

  “I don’t know what you think of yourself, Misha,” she said, and heaved a sigh. “Really, God might punish you for it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. Excuse my meddling in your affairs. But it seems you are spoiling your own life out of obstinacy. You’ll admit that it is high time you got married, and she is an excellent and deserving girl. You will never find anyone better. She’s a beauty, clever, gentle, and devoted. . . . And her appearance! . . . If she belonged to our circle or a higher one, people would be falling in love with her for her red hair alone. See how beautifully her hair goes with her complexion. Oh, goodness! You don’t understand anything, and don’t know what you want,” Anna Akimovna said bitterly, and tears came into her eyes. “Poor girl, I am so sorry for her! I know you want a wife with money, but I have told you already I will give Masha a dowry.”