The mill was working, drowning out the sound of the rain; the dam trembled. By the wagons stood wet horses, hanging their heads, and people went back and forth, covering themselves with sacks. It was damp, muddy, comfortless, and the pool looked cold and dire. Ivan Ivanych and Burkin experienced a sensation of wetness and dirt, a discomfort through the whole body, feet heavy with mud, and as they crossed the dam to climb toward the manorial barns, they were silent, as if angry with one another.
In one of the barns a winnowing machine was noisily at work; the door was open, and dust poured out. Just at hand stood Alyokhin himself, a man of forty, tall, heavy, with long hair, more like a professor or artist than a landowner. He wore a white but long-unwashed shirt with a rope belt, long johns instead of trousers, and his boots were clotted with mud and straw. His nose and eyes were black with dust. He recognized Ivan Ivanych and Burkin, and it was obvious he was glad to see them.
“To the house, please, gentlemen,” he said, smiling. “I’ll be there right away, this very minute.”
The house was large, with two storeys. Alyokhin lived downstairs in two rooms with vaulted ceilings and small windows, where the farm managers used to live. The furnishings were simple, and it smelled of rye bread, cheap vodka, and harness. He seldom went upstairs to the reception rooms, only when guests arrived. A maid welcomed Burkin and Ivan Ivanych to the house, a young woman so beautiful that they both stopped short and stared at each other.
“You can’t imagine how glad I am to see you, gentlemen,” Alyokhin said as he came into the antechamber behind them. “I certainly didn’t expect you.” He turned to the maid. “Pelageya, offer our guests someplace to change their clothes. Yes, and while you do, I’ll change mine. Only first I must go and wash up; it must look as if I haven’t washed since spring. Come to the bathhouse if you like, by then they’ll have everything here prepared.”
The beautiful Pelageya, so tactful, so pleasing to look at, brought soap and towelling, and Alyokhin went to the bathhouse with his guests.
“Yes it’s been a good while since I washed,” he said, as he undressed. “My bathhouse, as you see, is a fine one, my father built it long since, but somehow it never gets used.”
He sat on the step and soaped his long hair and his neck, and the water around him turned brown.
“Yes, I can see . . . ,” pronounced Ivan Ivanych, glancing meaningfully at his head.
“Haven’t washed for a long time now,” Alyokhin repeated self-consciously, and soaped himself again, and the water around him turned dark blue, almost black.
Ivan Ivanych went outside, plunged into the water with a splash and started swimming along under the rain, stretching his arms wide, and waves spread outward, and the white water-lilies rocked on the waves; he swam out to the very centre of the pool and dived, and after a moment he appeared in another place, and began to swim further, diving over and over, trying to reach the bottom. “Oh my God . . . ,” he repeated delightedly. “Oh my God . . .” He swam over to the mill, and there he talked about something with the men, then turned back and lay in the centre of the pool, turning his face up under the rain. Burkin and Alyokhin, dressed again, were prepared to leave, but he continued to swim and dive.
“Oh my God,” he said, “Lord have mercy.”
“So be it,” Burkin shouted to him.
They returned to the house. And only when they had lit the lamp in the big sitting room upstairs, and Burkin and Ivan Ivanych, dressed in silk dressing gowns and warm slippers, were sitting in armchairs, and Alyokhin himself, washed, his hair brushed, in a new frock coat, had come to the sitting room, visibly pleased at feeling the warmth, clean, dry clothes, comfortable footwear, and after the beautiful Pelageya, her footsteps noiseless on the carpet, had brought a tray of tea and jam, only then did Ivan Ivanych begin his story, and it seemed that not only Burkin and Alyokhin were listening to him but also the old and young ladies and the soldiers quietly and severely observing from gold frames.
“We are two brothers,” he began, “myself, Ivan Ivanych, and the other, Nikolai Ivanych, the younger by two years. I entered a course of study and became a veterinarian, while Nikolai, when he was nineteen, took up a position in the department of finance. Our father, Chimsha-Himalaiski, was a private’s son, but by qualifying as an officer he left us with the rank and estate of gentlemen. After his death our inheritance was all tied up in debt, but whatever was to come later on, we passed our childhood in the country, doing as we pleased. Day and night we ran about the fields and the woods just like peasant children, guarding the horses, stripping bark off the lindens, catching fish, things like that . . . And you know that anyone who at some time in his life has caught perch or watched the migrating thrushes, how they rush about in flocks over the countryside in the clear cool days, will never be a city boy, and until the day of his death will savour such liberty. My brother was miserable in the finance department. The years passed, and he sat there, always in one place, always writing on the same paper and always thinking just one thing – if only he was in the country. And this yearning of his turned little by little into a settled wish, a dream of buying himself a little country place, somewhere on the shore of a lake or river.
He was a good, humble man, I loved him, but I never sympathized with the way he imprisoned himself all his life in this wish to own a place in the country. There’s a saying that a man needs only six feet of land. But of course the six feet is what you need for a corpse, not a man. These days they say that it’s a fine thing when our educated men feel the pull of the land and aspire to a country estate. But this country estate comes down to the same six feet of earth. Leaving the city, the struggle, leaving the worldly clamour in order to hide away at a place in the country, that isn’t life, that’s egotism, idleness, it’s some kind of monasticism, but monasticism without the challenges. A man doesn’t need six feet of earth, or a place in the country, but the whole globe, the whole of nature, where there’s scope to manifest all that he is, all the qualities of his free soul.
My brother Nikolai, sitting at home in his study, dreamed of how he would eat cabbage soup from his own land, how the appetizing smell would fill the whole yard, and he’d eat on the green grass, sleep in the sun, sit for whole hours outside the gate on a little bench and look at the fields and woods.
Pamphlets on agriculture and the kind of advice found in almanacs gave shape to his enjoyment, were his favourite spiritual food; he loved to read newspapers, but in them he read only the one thing, advertisements for the sale of so many tenths of ploughed land and meadow, with a farmhouse, a river, an orchard, a mill with spring-fed ponds. And there loomed up in his head paths in the garden, flowers, fruit, houses for starlings, carp in the ponds, you know, all that stuff. These imaginary pictures changed, depending on the advertisement he’d come across, but for some reason, in every one, without fail, there were gooseberries. He could fancy no farm, no poetic nook, without gooseberries.
‘Country life has its comforts,’ he used to say. ‘Sitting out on the balcony you drink your tea, and the ducks float on the pond, it smells so good . . . and the gooseberries are growing.’
He’d draw a plan of his estate, and every time on his plan appeared the same a) gentleman’s house, b) servants’ quarters, c) vegetable garden, d) gooseberries. He lived on the cheap: he was underfed, he didn’t drink, he dressed God knows how, like a beggar, and everything was saved up and put in the bank. He was terribly stingy. It made me sick to look at him, and I’d give him something or send holiday gifts, and he hid it all away. Once a man gives himself up to an idea there’s nothing you can do.