Short Stories by Chekhov
from us. Moreover, the school at Kurilovka in which children-from four
villages, our Dubetchnya 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 Dubetchnya 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 waggon. 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 clamour for
the mistress to come out to them; coarse oaths were audible. Meanwhile
Moisey 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 foundations 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 savouries, and after a prolonged meal lay
down for a nap in the verandah and snored so loudly that the labourers
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 humour and said unpleasant things about our
management of the place, or expressed regret that he had bought
Dubetchnya, 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 roubles on
telegrams alone."
He no longer called me a dissenter or Mr. 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 every 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 eel-pout 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 many
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. . . .
XIII
Dr. Blagovo arrived on his bicycle. My sister began coming often. Again
there were conversations about manual labour, about progress, about a
mysterious millennium awaiting mankind in the remote future. The doctor
did not like our farmwork, because it interfered with arguments, and
said that ploughing, 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 labour; in the
evening, sitting on the verandah 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
labourers 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! Petchenyegs!"
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 clamoured 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
Dubetchnya peasants, a regular shark, who did a trade in vodka without a
licence, bribed our labourers, 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 ploughing 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,