Peasants and Other Stories

  Varvara danced, but the old man only waved his handkerchief and kicked up his heels, but the people in the yard, propped against one another, peeping in at the windows, were in raptures, and for the moment forgave him everything—his wealth and the wrongs he had done them.

  “Well done, Grigory Petrovich!” was heard in the crowd. “That’s right, do your best! You can still play your part! Ha-ha!”

  It was kept up till late, till two o’clock in the morning. Anisim, staggering, went to take leave of the singers and bandsmen and gave each of them a new half ruble. His father, who was not staggering but still seemed to be standing on one leg, saw his guests off, and said to each of them:

  “The wedding has cost two thousand.”

  As the party was breaking up, someone took the Shikalovo innkeeper’s good coat instead of his own old one, and Anisim suddenly flew into a rage and began shouting:

  “Stop, I’ll find it at once; I know who stole it, stop.”

  He ran out into the street and pursued someone. He was caught, brought back home, and shoved, drunken, red with anger, and wet, into the room where the aunt was undressing Lipa, and was locked in.

  4.

  Five days had passed. Anisim, who was preparing to go, went upstairs to say good-bye to Varvara. All the lamps were burning before the icons, there was a smell of incense, while she sat at the window knitting a stocking of red wool.

  “You have not stayed with us long,” she said. “You’ve been dull, I dare say. Oh, tut, tut. . . . We live comfortably; we have plenty of everything. We celebrated your wedding properly, in good style; your father says it came to two thousand. In fact we live like merchants, only it’s dreary. We treat the people very badly. My heart aches, my dear; how we treat them, my goodness! Whether we exchange a horse or buy something or hire a laborer—it’s cheating in everything. Cheating and cheating. The Lenten oil in the shop is bitter, rancid; the people have pitch that is better. But surely, tell me pray, couldn’t we sell good oil?”

  “Every man to his own job, Mamma.”

  “But you know we all have to die? Oy, oy, really you ought to talk to your father . . .!”

  “Why, you should talk to him yourself.”

  “Well, well, I did put in my word, but he said just what you do: ‘Every man to his own job.’ Do you suppose in the next world they’ll consider what job you have been put to? God’s judgment is just.”

  “Of course no one will consider,” said Anisim, and he heaved a sigh. “There is no God, anyway, you know, Mamma, so what considering can there be?”

  Varvara looked at him with surprise, burst out laughing, and clasped her hands. Perhaps because she was so genuinely surprised at his words and looked at him as though he were a queer person, he was confused.

  “Perhaps there is a God, only there is no faith. When I was being married I was not myself. Just as you may take an egg from under a hen and there is a chicken chirping in it, so my conscience was beginning to chirp in me, and while I was being married I thought all the time there was a God! But when I left the church it was nothing. And indeed, how can I tell whether there is a God or not? We are not taught right from childhood, and while the babe is still at his mother’s breast he is only taught ‘every man to his own job.’ Father does not believe in God, either. You were saying that Guntorev had some sheep stolen. . . . I have found them; it was a peasant at Shikalovo stole them; he stole them, but father’s got the fleeces . . . so that’s all his faith amounts to.”

  Anisim winked and wagged his head.

  “The elder does not believe in God, either,” he went on. “And the clerk and the deacon, too. And as for their going to church and keeping the fasts, that is simply to prevent people talking ill of them, and in case it really may be true that there will be a Day of Judgment. Nowadays people say that the end of the world has come because people have grown weaker, do not honor their parents, and so on. All that is nonsense. My idea, Mamma, is that all our trouble is because there is so little conscience in people. I see through things, Mamma, and I understand. If a man has a stolen shirt, I see it. A man sits in a tavern and you fancy he is drinking tea and no more, but to me the tea is neither here nor there; I see further, he has no conscience. You can go about the whole day and not meet one man with a conscience. And the whole reason is that they don’t know whether there is a God or not. . . . Well, good-bye, Mamma, keep alive and well; don’t remember evil against me.”

  Anisim bowed down at Varvara’s feet.

  “I thank you for everything, Mamma,” he said. “You are a great gain to our family. You are a very ladylike woman, and I am very pleased with you.”

  Much moved, Anisim went out but returned again and said:

  “Samorodov has got me mixed up in something: I shall either make my fortune or come to grief. If anything happens, then you must comfort my father, Mamma.”

  “Oh, nonsense, don’t you worry, tut, tut, tut . . . God is merciful. And, Anisim, you should be affectionate to your wife, instead of giving each other sulky looks as you do; you might smile at least.”

  “Yes, she is rather a queer one,” said Anisim, and he gave a sigh. “She does not understand anything, she never speaks. She is very young, let her grow up.”

  A tall, sleek white stallion was already standing at the front door, harnessed to the chaise.

  Old Tsybukin jumped in jauntily with a run and took the reins. Anisim kissed Varvara, Aksinya, and his brother. On the steps Lipa, too, was standing; she was standing motionless, looking away, and it seemed as though she had not come to see him off but just by chance for some unknown reason. Anisim went up to her and just touched her cheek with his lips.

  “Good-bye,” he said.

  And, without looking at him, she gave a strange smile; her face began to quiver, and everyone for some reason felt sorry for her. Anisim, too, leaped into the chaise with a bound and put his arms jauntily akimbo, for he considered himself a good-looking fellow.

  When they drove up out of the ravine Anisim kept looking back towards the village. It was a warm, bright day. The cattle were being driven out for the first time, and the peasant girls and women were walking by the herd in their holiday dresses. The dun-colored bull bellowed, glad to be free, and pawed the ground with his forefeet. On all sides, above and below, the larks were singing. Anisim looked round at the elegant white church—it had only lately been whitewashed—and he thought how he had been praying in it five days before; he looked round at the school with its green roof, at the little river in which he used once to bathe and catch fish, and there was a stir of joy in his heart, and he wished that walls might rise up from the ground and prevent him from going further, and that he might be left with nothing but the past.

  At the station they went to the refreshment room and drank a glass of sherry each. His father felt in his pocket for his purse to pay.

  “I will stand treat,” said Anisim. The old man, touched and delighted, slapped him on the shoulder, and winked to the waiter as much as to say, “See what a fine son I have got.”

  “You ought to stay at home in the business, Anisim,” he said; “you would be worth any price to me! I would shower gold on you from head to foot, my son.”

  “It can’t be done, Papa.”

  The sherry was sour and smelled of sealing wax, but they had another glass.

  When old Tsybukin returned home from the station, for the first moment he did not recognize his younger daughter-in-law. As soon as her husband had driven out of the yard, Lipa was transformed and suddenly brightened up. Wearing a threadbare old petticoat, with her feet bare and her sleeves tucked up to the shoulders, she was scrubbing the stairs in the entry and singing in a silvery little voice, and when she brought out a big tub of dirty water and looked up at the sun with her childlike smile it seemed as though she, too, were a lark.

  An old laborer who was passing by the door shook his head and cleared his throat.

  “Yes, indeed, your daughters-in-law, Grigory Petrovich, are a
blessing from God,” he said. “Not women, but treasures!”

  5.

  On Friday the eighth of July, Elizarov, nicknamed Crutch, and Lipa were returning from the village of Kazanskoe, where they had been to a service on the occasion of a church holiday in the honor of the Holy Mother of Kazan. A good distance after them walked Lipa’s mother Praskovya, who always fell behind, as she was ill and short of breath. It was drawing towards evening.

  “A-a-a . . .” said Crutch, wondering as he listened to Lipa. “A-a! . . . We-ell!”

  “I am very fond of jam, Ilya Makarich,” said Lipa. “I sit down in my little corner and drink tea and eat jam. Or I drink it with Varvara Nikolaevna, and she tells some story full of feeling. We have a lot of jam—four jars. ‘Have some, Lipa; eat as much as you like.’ ”

  “A-a-a, four jars!”

  “They live very well. We have white bread with our tea; and meat, too, as much as one wants. They live very well, only I am frightened with them, Ilya Makarich. Oh, oh, how frightened I am!”

  “Why are you frightened, child?” asked Crutch, and he looked back to see how far Praskovya was behind.

  “To begin with, when the wedding had been celebrated I was afraid of Anisim Grigorich. Anisim Grigorich did nothing, he didn’t ill-treat me, only when he comes near me a cold shiver runs all over me, through all my bones. And I did not sleep one night, I trembled all over and kept praying to God. And now I am afraid of Aksinya, Ilya Makarich. It’s not that she does anything, she is always laughing, but sometimes she glances at the window, and her eyes are so fierce and there is a gleam of green in them—like the eyes of the sheep in the shed. The Khrymin Juniors are leading her astray: ‘Your old man,’ they tell her, ‘has a bit of land at Butyokino, a hundred and twenty acres,’ they say, ‘and there is sand and water there, so you, Aksinya,’ they say, ‘build a brickyard there and we will go shares in it.’ Bricks now are twenty rubles the thousand, it’s a profitable business. Yesterday at dinner Aksinya said to my father-in-law: ‘I want to build a brickyard at Butyokino; I’m going into business on my own account.’ She laughed as she said it. And Grigory Petrovich’s face darkened, one could see he did not like it. ‘As long as I live,’ he said, ‘the family must not break up, we must go on all together.’ She gave a look and gritted her teeth. . . . Fritters were served, she would not eat them.”

  “A-a-a! . . .” Crutch was surprised.

  “And tell me, if you please, when does she sleep?” said Lipa. “She sleeps for half an hour, then jumps up and keeps walking and walking about to see whether the peasants have not set fire to something, have not stolen something. . . . I am frightened with her, Ilya Makarich. And the Khrymin Juniors did not go to bed after the wedding, but drove to the town to go to law with each other; and folks do say it is all on account of Aksinya. Two of the brothers have promised to build her a brickyard, but the third is offended, and the factory has been at a standstill for a month, and my uncle Prokhor is without work and goes about from house to house getting crusts. ‘Hadn’t you better go working on the land or sawing up wood, meanwhile, Uncle?’ I tell him; ‘why disgrace yourself?’ ‘I’ve got out of the way of it,’ he says; ‘I don’t know how to do any sort of peasant’s work now, Lipinka.’ ”

  They stopped to rest and wait for Praskovya near a copse of young aspen trees. Elizarov had long been a contractor in a small way, but he kept no horses, going on foot all over the district with nothing but a little bag in which there was bread and onions, and stalking along with big strides, swinging his arms. And it was difficult to walk with him.

  At the entrance to the copse stood a milestone. Elizarov touched it; read it. Praskovya reached them out of breath. Her wrinkled and always scared-looking face was beaming with happiness; she had been at church today like anyone else, then she had been to the fair and there had drunk pear cider. For her this was unusual, and it even seemed to her now that she had lived for her own pleasure that day for the first time in her life. After resting, they all three walked on side by side. The sun had already set, and its beams filtered through the copse, casting a light on the trunks of the trees. There was a faint sound of voices ahead. The Ukleyevo girls had long before pushed on ahead but had lingered in the copse, probably gathering mushrooms.

  “Hey, wenches!” cried Elizarov. “Hey, my beauties!”

  There was a sound of laughter in response.

  “Crutch is coming! Crutch! The old horse-radish.”

  And the echo laughed, too. And then the copse was left behind. The tops of the factory chimneys came into view. The cross on the belfry glittered: this was the village: “the one at which the deacon ate all the caviar at the funeral.” Now they were almost home; they only had to go down into the big ravine. Lipa and Praskovya, who had been walking barefooted, sat down on the grass to put on their boots; Elizarov sat down with them. If they looked down from above, Ukleyevo was beautiful and peaceful with its willow trees, its white church, and its little river, and the only blot on the picture was the roofs of the factories, painted for the sake of cheapness a gloomy ashen gray. On the slope on the further side they could see the rye—some in stacks and sheaves here and there as though strewn about by the storm, and some freshly cut lying in swathes; the oats, too, were ripe and glistened now in the sun like mother-of-pearl. It was harvesttime. Today was a holiday, tomorrow they would harvest the rye and carry the hay, and then Sunday a holiday again; every day there were mutterings of distant thunder. It was misty and looked like rain, and, gazing now at the fields, everyone thought, “God grant we get the harvest in in time”; and everyone felt gay and joyful and anxious at heart.

  “Mowers ask a high price nowadays,” said Praskovya. “One ruble and forty kopecks a day.”

  People kept coming and coming from the fair at Kazanskoe: peasant women, factory workers in new caps, beggars, children. . . . Here a cart would drive by stirring up the dust and behind it would run an unsold horse, and it seemed glad it had not been sold; then a cow was led along by the horns, resisting stubbornly; then a cart again, and in it drunken peasants swinging their legs. An old woman led a little boy in a big cap and big boots; the boy was tired out with the heat and the heavy boots which prevented his bending his legs at the knees, but yet blew unceasingly with all his might at a tin trumpet. They had gone down the slope and turned into the street, but the trumpet could still be heard.

  “Our factory owners don’t seem quite themselves . . .” said Elizarov. “There’s trouble. Kostukov is angry with me. ‘Too many boards have gone on the cornices.’ ‘Too many? As many have gone on it as were needed, Vassily Danilich; I don’t eat them with my porridge.’ ‘How can you speak to me like that?’ said he. ‘You good-for-nothing blockhead! Don’t forget yourself! It was I made you a contractor.’ ‘That’s nothing so wonderful,’ said I. ‘Even before I was a contractor I used to have tea every day.’ ‘You are a rascal,’ he said. I said nothing. ‘We are rascals in this world,’ thought I, ‘and you will be a rascal in the next. . . .’ Ha-ha-ha! The next day he was softer. ‘Don’t you bear malice against me for my words, Makarich,’ he said. ‘If I said too much,’ says he, ‘what of it? I am a merchant of the first guild, your superior—you ought to hold your tongue.’ ‘You,’ said I, ‘are a merchant of the first guild and I am a carpenter, that’s correct. And St. Joseph was a carpenter, too. Ours is a righteous calling and pleasing to God, and if you are pleased to be my superior you are very welcome to it, Vassily Danilich.’ And later on—after that conversation I mean—I thought: ‘Which is the superior? A merchant of the first guild or a carpenter?’ The carpenter must be, my child!”

  Crutch thought a minute and added:

  “Yes, that’s how it is, child. He who works, he who is patient is the superior.”

  By now the sun had set and a thick mist as white as milk was rising over the river, in the church enclosure, and in the open spaces round the factories. Now when the darkness was coming on rapidly, when lights were twinkling below, and when
it seemed as though the mists were hiding a fathomless abyss, Lipa and her mother, who were born in poverty and prepared to live so till the end, giving up to others everything except their frightened, gentle souls, may have fancied for a minute perhaps that in the vast, mysterious world, among the endless series of lives, they, too, counted for something, and they, too, were superior to someone; they liked sitting here at the top, they smiled happily and forgot that they must go down below again all the same.

  At last they went home again. The mowers were sitting on the ground at the gates near the shop. As a rule the Ukleyevo peasants did not go to Tsybukin’s to work, and they had to hire strangers, and now in the darkness it seemed as though there were men sitting there with long black beards. The shop was open, and through the doorway they could see the deaf man playing draughts with a boy. The mowers were singing softly, scarcely audibly, or loudly demanding their wages for the previous day, but they were not paid for fear they should go away before tomorrow. Old Tsybukin, with his coat off, was sitting in his waistcoat with Aksinya under the birch tree, drinking tea; a lamp was burning on the table.

  “I say, grandfather,” a mower called from outside the gates, as though taunting him, “pay us half anyway! Hey, grandfather.”

  And at once there was the sound of laughter, and then again they sang hardly audibly. . . . Crutch, too, sat down to have some tea.

  “We have been at the fair, you know,” he began telling them. “We have had a walk, a very nice walk, my children, praise the Lord. But an unfortunate thing happened: Sashka, the blacksmith, bought some tobacco and gave the shopman half a ruble to be sure. And the half ruble was a false one,” Crutch went on, and he meant to speak in a whisper, but he spoke in a smothered husky voice which was audible to everyone. “The half ruble turned out to be a bad one. He was asked where he got it. ‘Anisim Tsybukin gave it me,’ he said. ‘When I went to his wedding,’ he said. They called the police inspector, took the man away. . . . Look out, Grigory Petrovich, that nothing comes of it, no talk. . . .”