The village. [Translation from the original Russian text by Isabel Hapgood] (19 page)

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All at once, from under the band-stand, a cough became audible, and a clearing of the throat. "Motka," Kuzma said to himself. And sure enough, from under the stairs crawled Duck-Headed Matty. He wore rusty soldier's boots, an extremely long uniform from the shoulders of a second-school boy, besprinkled with flour—evidently the bazaar had been making merry—and a straw hat which had once been run over by wheels. With his eyes still closed, spitting and staggering with intoxication, he stalked past, without so much as asking for a smoke. Kuzma, repressing his tears, shouted to him: "Mot! Come, let's have a chat, and a smoke—"

And Motka turned, seated himself on the bench, began drowsily, with twitching brows, to roll himself a cigarette. But apparently he had only a dim idea as to the identity of the person who was sitting by his side—who it was that was complaining to him about his fate. . . .

On the following day that same Motka brought Tikhon's note to Kuzma. And, once more, the noose which had come near strangling Kuzma broke.

At the end of September he went to Durnovka.

PART THREE

THE estate at Durnovka was arranged after the plan of a farm. In fact, it had originally borne precisely that title. Durnovo had owned several estates and had occupied the chief of them, the one at Zusha. Afanasiy Hitch, who had hunted the Gipsy with dogs, came only occasionally to Durnovka, on his way from a hunting expedition. Nil Afansaievitch, the Marshal of the Nobility, had no taste for farms: he had spent his whole life in organizing dinners, drinking sherry at his club, glorying in his fat, his appetite, his ringing whisper—he had a silver throat—in his lavishness, his witticisms, and his absence of mind. And his son, also, the Uhlan, who bore the name of his grandfather, rarely looked in at Durnovka. The Uhlan still considered himself a great landed proprietor. On retiring from the service he decided to accumulate millions, to show how an estate ought to be managed. But the Uhlan was not fond of being in the fields, and his passion for making purchases helped to ruin him: he bought almost everything his eye fell upon. His trips to Moscow and his amorous constitution likewise contributed to his ruin. His son, who did not finish at the Lyceum, received as his heritage only two farms—

[203]

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Laukhino and Durnovka. And the Lyceum student ruined these to such a point that, during the last year he spent at Durnovka, the duties of watchman were discharged by an old scullery-maid, who went about at night with her mallet, garbed in a rusty raccoon cloak. "Well, never mind," Kuzma said to himself, rejoiced to the verge of tears by Tikhon's proposal, and profoundly concealing his joy. "If 'tis a farm, call it a farm! A good thing, too: 'tis a regular end-of-nowhere, savage as in the Tatar times!"

At one period Ilya MironofT had lived in Durnovka for a couple of years. At the time Kuzma had been a mere child, and all he retained of it in his memory was, first, the fragrant hemp-fields, which drowned Durnovka, as it were, in a dark-green sea, and, secondly, one dark summer night. There had been not a single light in the village on that night. Past their cottage had filed, their chemises gleaming white in the darkness, "nine maidens, nine women, and the tenth a widow," all bare-foot, with hair flowing free, armed with brooms, oaken cudgels, and pitchforks. A deafening ringing of bells had arisen, and a thumping of oven-covers and frying pans, high above which soared a wild choral chant. The widow dragged a plough; alongside her walked a maiden carrying a large holy picture; while the rest rang bells, and thumped, and when the widow led off in a low tone,

"Thou cow-death, Enter not our village!"

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the chorus repeated in long-drawn tones, with funereal intonations:

"We plough—"

and mournfully, in throaty tones, took up the refrain,

"With incense, with the cross . . ."

Now the aspect of the Durnovka fields was commonplace. The hemp plantations had vanished, and, even if they had not, the fields would have been bare in autumn, as well as the vegetable patches and the back yards. Kuzma set forth from Vorgol in a cheerful and slightly intoxicated state. Tikhon Hitch had treated him to liqueur cordial at dinner, and at tea, after dinner, Nastasya Petrovna had treated him to two kinds of preserves. Tikhon Hitch was very kindly disposed on that day. He recalled his youth, his childhood; how they had eaten buckwheat cakes together, how they had shouted "Tally-ho!" after the Dog's Pistol, and had studied with Byelkin; he called his wife "auntie" and ridiculed her trips to the nun Polukarpia for the good of her soul; he said, with regard to Kuzma's salary: "We'll square that, dear brother, we'll make that right—I'll not wrong you!" he referred briefly to the revolution: "That little bird started singing too early—look out, or the cat will eat it!" Kuzma rode a dark brown gelding, and around him lay outspread a sea of dark brown ploughed fields. The sun, almost like that of summer, the transparent air, the clear pale-blue sky, all gladdened him

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and gave promise of prolonged repose. The grey, crooked wormwood, turned up roots and all by the plough, was so plentiful that it was being carried off by the carload. Close to the farm itself, in the ploughed field, stood a wretched little nag, with burdocks in his forelock, and a springless cart, piled high with wormwood; and beside it lay Yakoff, bare-legged, in dusty breeches and a long hempen shirt, his side squeezed against a large grey dog which he was holding by the ear. The dog was growling and darting angry sidelong glances.

"Does he bite?" shouted Kuzma.

"He's savage—there's no taming him!" Yakoff made haste to reply, as he raised his slanting beard. "He jumps at the horses' muzzles."

And Kuzma burst out laughing with pleasure. The peasant was a regular peasant—and the steppe was a genuine steppe!

The road ran down a hill, and the horizon became narrower. In front the new iron roof of a grain-kiln gleamed green, seeming drowned in the dense low growths of the park. Beyond the park, on the opposite slope, stood a long row of cottages constructed of bricks moulded from clay, and roofed with straw. On the right, beyond the ploughed fields, stretched a large ravine, merging into the one which separated the farm from the village. At the point where the ravines came together, a pond lay sparkling in the sunlight. On the promontory between them the wings of two unsheathed windmills reared themselves aloft, surrounded by several cottages belonging to one-homestead owners—

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the Mysoffs, 1 as Oska had dubbed them—and the whitewashed schoolhouse gleamed white on the pasture land.

"Well, and do the children get schooling?" inquired Kuzma.

" Tis obligatory," said Oska. "They have a scholar who is a terror!"

"What scholar are you talking about? Do you mean a teacher?"

"Well, then, teacher, it's all the same. The way he has educated those brats—I tell you, 'tis fine. He's a soldier. He beats them unmercifully, but on the other hand he has them well trained in all sorts of ways. Tikhon Hitch and I happened to drop in one day—and if they didn't all leap to their feet and bark out: 'We wish you health!' just as well as if they were soldiers!"

And once more Kuzma broke into a laugh.

But when he had passed the threshing-floor, had descended by the defective road past the cherry orchard and turned to the left, to the long farmyard, lying well dried and golden-hued in the sun, his heart actually began to beat violently. Here he was, at home, at last. And as he mounted the porch and stepped across the threshold, Kuzma gave vent to a sigh, and, making the sign of the cross on brow and breast, he bowed low before the dark holy picture in the corner of the ante-room. . . .

1 Thus manufacturing a family name out of "Mys," a promontory.— trans.

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And for a long time he cared not whether the Russian people had a future or not. He roamed about the manor estate, the village; he sat for hours at a time on the doorsteps of the cottages, on the threshing-floors—watching the inhabitants of Durnovka, enjoying the possibility of breathing pure air, of chatting with his new neighbours.

II

OPPOSITE the house, with their rear to Durnovka, to the wide ravine, stood the storehouses. From the porch, half of the village was visible, and beyond the storehouses the pond and a part of the promontory—one windmill and the schoolhouse. The sun rose to the left, beyond the fields, beyond the railway line on the horizon. In the morning the pond glittered with a bright, fresh exhalation, and from the park behind the house was wafted an odour of foliage from evergreens and leaf trees, steppe grass, apples, and dew. The rooms were small and empty. In the study, papered with old music sheets, rye was stored; in the hall and the drawing-room no furniture was left save a few Viennese chairs with broken seats and a large extension table. The windows of the drawing-room overlooked the park, and during almost the entire autumn Kuzma passed the night in it, on a broken-down couch, without closing the windows. The floor was never swept: the widow Odnodvorka lived there

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temporarily, in the capacity of cook; she had been the mistress of young Durnovo, and was obliged to run after her small children and prepare food, after a fashion, for herself, Kuzma, and the labourer. Kuzma himself prepared the samovar in the morning, after which he sat at the window in the hall and drank tea and ate apples.

Through the early glitter, beyond the brilliant mist over the ploughed fields, the railway train dashed past in the morning; and, above, rose-coloured wreaths floated behind it. Dense smoke hung over the roofs of the village. The garden was freshly fragrant; silvery hoar-frost lay upon the storehouses. At noon the sun stood over the village; it was hot out of doors;,in the park the maples and lindens grew thin, quietly dropping their leaves; the vast spaces and the transparent dry air of the fields were filled with silence and with peace. The doves, warmed up by the sun, dozed all day long on the sloping roof of the kitchen, whose new straw roof gleamed yellow against the clear blue sky. The labourer rested after his dinner. Odnodvorka went off to her own home.

But Kuzma roamed about. He went to the threshing-floor, rejoicing in the sun, the firm road, the withered steppe grass, the beet-tops which had turned dark brown, the charming late flower of the blue chicory, and the down of the cotton thistle floating quietly through the air. The ploughed spaces in the fields gleamed in the sunlight with the silken threads of barely visible spiders' webs, which extended to an immense distance. In the vegetable garden,

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goldfinches perched on the dry stalks of the burdocks. Upon the threshing-floor, amid the profound stillness in the sultry heat, grasshoppers diligently emitted their hoarse cry.

From the threshing-floor Kuzma climbed across the earthen well and returned to the manor-house through the orchard and the fir plantation. In the orchard he chatted with the petty burghers, the lessees of the orchard, with the Bride and the Goat, who were gathering up the windfalls, and forced his way, in their company, into the nettle patch where lay the ripest fruit of all. Sometimes he wandered to the village, to the schoolhouse. He became freshened up, sunburned; he felt himself almost happy.

The Goat amazed him by her health, her cheery stupidity, her senselessly brilliant Egyptian eyes. The Bride was handsome and strange. With him, as with Tikhon, she remained silent; not a word was to be got out of her. But when one went away she gave vent to a harsh laugh, indulged in bawling conversations with the petty burghers, and would suddenly strike up:

"Let them thrash me, curse me— My pretty eyes will twinkle more . . ."

The soldier-teacher, born stupid, had lost in the service what small wits he had ever possessed. In appearance he was the most commonplace sort of peasant, about forty years of age. But he always spoke in such an extraordinary manner, and uttered such

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nonsense, that all one could do was to throw up one's hands in despair. He was for ever smiling with the greatest appearance of slyness at something or other; he looked down upon his interlocutor condescendingly, with his eyes screwed up, and never replied to any question immediately.

"How am I to address you?" Kuzma asked him the first time he visited the school.

The soldier blinked and considered the matter. "The sheep without a name might be a ram," he said at last, at his leisure. "But I will ask you something also. Is Adam a name, or is it not?"

"It is."

"Very well. And about how many people, for example, have died since then?"

"I don't know," said Kuzma. "Why do you inquire?"

"Simply because that's one of the things we never were born to understand. Now, take any busybody you like. Do you indulge in revolt? Do it, my dear man: perhaps you will become a /z£-marshal! Only, at best, that they may stretch you out without your breeches for a flogging. Are you a peasant? Till the soil. Are you a cooper? In that case, equally, attend to your business. I, for example, am a soldier and a veterinary. Not long ago I was passing through the Fair, and what should I see but a horse with the glanders? I went at once to the policeman: 'Thus and so,' says I, 'Your High Well-born.' 'But can you kill that horse with a feather?' 'With the greatest pleasure!' "

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"With what sort of a feather?" inquired Kuzma.

"Why, a goose feather. I took it, sharpened it, jabbed it into his spinal cord, blew a little—into the feather, I mean—and the thing was done. Tis a simple matter, to all appearance, but just try to do it!" And the soldier winked craftily and tapped his brow with his finger: "Understanding is needed here."

Kuzma shrugged his shoulders and made no reply. And as he passed Odnodvorka's cottage he found out from her boy Senka what the soldier's name was. It turned out to be Parmen.

"And what's your task for to-morrow?" added Kuzma, gazing with curiosity at Senka's fiery red mop of hair, his lively green eyes, his pock-marked face, his rickety little body, and his hands and feet all cracked with mud and chaps.

"The tasks are verses," said Senka, grasping his uplifted foot in his right hand and hopping up and down on one spot.

"What sort of tasks?"

"Counting the geese. A flock of geese has flown past—"

"Ah, I know," said Kuzma. "And what else?"

"Also mice—"

"They are to be counted too?"

"Yes. Six mice were walking along carrying six copper coins," mumbled Senka rapidly, casting a sidelong glance at Kuzma's silver watch chain. "One mouse, which was bigger, carried two coins. How many does that make in all—?"

"Splendid. And what are the verses?"

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Senka released his foot.

"The verses are 'Who is he?'"

"Have you learned them?"

"Yes, I have."

"Well, then, say them."

And Senka muttered still more rapidly about a horseman who was riding above the Neva through the forests, where there were only—

"Firs, pine-trees, and green moss. . . .'"

"Grey," said Kuzma, "not green."

"Well, then, grey," assented Senka.

"And who was that horseman?"

Senka considered the matter. "Why, a sorcerer," said he.

"Exactly. Now, tell your mother that she ought to cut your hair, on your temples at least. Tis all the worse for you as it is, when the teacher pulls it."

"Then he'll find my ears," said Senka unconcernedly, again grasping his foot, and off he hopped on the pasture common.

Ill

THE promontory and Durnovka lived in a state of perpetual enmity and mutual disdain, as adjoining villages always do. The promontory dwellers regarded the Durnovka folk in the light of bandits and beggars, while the Durnovka people returned the compliment precisely and in full measure.

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Durnovka was "gentry property," while on the promontory dwelt "boors," one-farm petty owners—more properly speaking, the remains of the one-farm people who had emigrated to the Tomsk Government. Od-nodvorka was the only person who was not included in this enmity, these quarrels. Small, thin, dependable, she was lively, even-tempered, and agreeable in intercourse; and she was observant. She knew every family on the promontory and in Durnovka as well as if it were her own; she was the first to inform the manor-house of every smallest happening in the life of the village. And every one was also thoroughly well acquainted with her life.

She never concealed anything from anybody; she talked calmly and simply about her husband and Durnovo and stated that she had become a procuress when he went away. "What could I do?" she said, with a faint sigh. "I was dreadfully poor; I had not enough bread even after the new harvest. My good husband loved me, to speak the plain truth, but one has to submit, you know. The master gave three whole carloads of rye for me. 'What can I do?' I said to my husband. Twas plain, I must go, he said. He went for the rye, dragged home measure after measure, and his tears drip-dripped, drip-dripped all the while." And, after a moment's thought, she added: "Well, and later on, when the master went away, and my husband went to RostofT, I began to bring people together, as chance occurred. You're immoral dogs, the Lord forgive you!"

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By day she toiled, never pausing for a moment; by night she mended, sewed, stole snow-screens from the railway. Once late at night, when Kuzma was driving to Tikhon Hitch, he ascended a hillock and halted paralyzed with fright: across the ploughed land, half deluged in darkness, on a faintly smouldering strip of the sunset, something black, huge, sprang up and bore down smoothly on Kuzma.

"Who's that?" he shouted feebly, tugging at his reins.

"Oil" feebly and in affright shouted that which had so swiftly and smoothly sprung up against the sky; and it disappeared with a crash.

Kuzma recovered himself—and instantly recognized, in the darkness, Odnodvorka. She had been running toward him on her light, unshod feet, all bent together with the weight of two screens a fathom long— the sort that are set up, in winter, along the railway line, to protect it from snowdrifts. And, having rearranged herself, she whispered, with a quiet laugh:

"You frightened me to death. When one runs off somewhere of a night, one is all a-tremble, but what can one do? The whole village uses these for firewood, and that's the only way we save ourselves from freezing."

The farm-hand Koshel, on the other hand, was a man not devoid of interest. There was nothing one could talk about with him, and he was not loquacious by nature. Like the majority of the Durnovka people, he merely repeated antiquated, insignificant apophthegms, reasserted that which had been known for

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many a long year. If the weather turned bad he cast an eye at the sky: "The weather's spoiling. Rain is what the growing green things most need at the present moment." The fields were ploughed a second time, and he remarked: "If you won't give a second ploughing you'll be left without bread. That's what the old people have always said."

He had been a soldier in his day—had been in the Caucasus—but the military life had left no traces on him. He was unable to pronounce the word "post-office" properly: he called it "spost-office." He could tell absolutely nothing whatsoever about the Caucasus, with the exception of the facts that mountain followed mountain there, and that terribly hot and strange waters spurted out of the ground. If you placed a piece of mutton in them, it was boiled in one minute, and if you didn't take it out at the proper time, it got raw again. And he was not in the least proud of the fact that he had seen the world; he even bore himself with scorn toward people who knew the world. It is well understood that people only "rove about" because they are forced to do so, or through poverty. He never believed a single rumour—"all lies!"—but he did believe, and swore to it as a fact, that not long ago a witch had rolled in the form of a wheel through the twilight shades near Basovka, and that one peasant, who was no fool, had taken and caught hold of that wheel and thrust his belt through the hub and tied it fast.

"Well, and what happened next?" asked Kuzma.

"What?" replied Koshel. "That witch waked up

the Village early in the morning, and, lo and behold, that belt was sticking out her mouth and behind, and was tied fast over her stomach."

"But why didn't she .untie it?"

"Evidently, the knot had had the sign of the cross made over it."

"And aren't you ashamed to believe such nonsense?"

"What is there for me to be ashamed of? People lie, and I let them talk."

So Kuzma only liked to hear the man's songs. As he sat in the darkness at the open window, without a light anywhere, with the village barely discernible like a black spot on the other side of the ravine, it was so quiet round about that the apples could be heard falling from the wild apple trees beyond the corner of the house. And Koshel walked slowly about the farmyard with his mallet, and with a serene melancholy hummed to himself in his falsetto voice: "Cease your song, canary, little bird." He kept watch over the manor until morning and slept by day. He had hardly anything to do: Tikhon Hitch had made haste to settle up Durnovka affairs betimes that year, and out of all the cattle only one horse and a cow remained. So things were quiet, even rather bore-some, at the manor-house. The clear days were followed by colder days, bluish-grey, soundless. The goldfinches and tomtits began to whistle in the bare park, the cross-bills to pipe in the fir trees, the cedar-birds made their appearance, bullfinches, and some sort of leisurely tiny birds which hopped in flocks from place to place on the threshing-floor, whose supports