‘I expect you’ll be sent to town to buy things,’ she continued. ‘I suppose a trusty person is wanted for that job so she is sending you! You might buy me a quarter of a pound of tea there, Polikéy.’
Akulína forced back her tears, and an angry expression distorted her lips. She felt as if she could have clutched ‘that vixen, the joiner’s wife, by her mangy hair’. But as she looked at her children and thought that they would be left fatherless and she herself be a soldier’s wife and as good as widowed, she forgot the sharp-tongued carpenter’s wife, hid her face in her hands, sat down on the bed, and let her head sink in the pillows.
‘Mammy, you’re cwushing me!’ lisped the little girl, pulling the cloak with which she was covered from under her mother’s elbow.
‘If only you’d die, all of you! I’ve brought you into the world for nothing but sorrow!’ cried Akulína, and sobbed aloud, to the delight of the carpenter’s wife who had not yet forgotten the lye spilt that morning.
IV
HALF an hour passed. The baby began to cry. Akulína got up and gave it the breast. Weeping no longer, but resting her thin though still handsome face on her hand and fixing her eyes on the last flickerings of the candle, she sat thinking why she had married, wondering why so many soldiers were needed, and also how she could pay out the carpenter’s wife.
She heard her husband’s footsteps and, wiping her tears, got up to let him pass. Polikéy entered like a conqueror, threw his cap on the bed, puffed, and undid his girdle.
‘Well, what did she want you for?’
‘H’m! Of course! Polikúshka is the least of men … but when there’s business to be done, who’s wanted? Why, Polikúshka.…’
‘What business?’
Polikéy was in no hurry to reply. He lit his pipe and spat.
‘To go and fetch money from a merchant.’
‘To fetch money?’ Akulína asked.
Polikéy chuckled and wagged his head.
‘Ah! Ain’t she clever at words?… “You have been regarded,” she says, “as an untrustworthy man, but I trust you more than another” ’ (Polikéy spoke loud that the neighbours might hear). ‘ “You promised me you’d reform; here”, she says, “is the first proof that I believe you. Go”, she says, “to the merchant, fetch the money he owes, and bring it back to me.” And I say: “We are all your serfs, ma’am,” I say, “and must serve you as we serve God; so I feel that I can do anything for your honour and cannot refuse any kind of work; whatever you order I will do, because I am your slave.” ’ (He again smiled that peculiar, weak, kindly, guilty smile.) ‘ “Well, then,” she says, “you will do it faithfully?… You understand,” she says, “that your fate depends on it?” – “How could I fail to understand that I can do it all? If they have told tales about me – well, anyone can tell tales about another … but I never in any way, I believe, have even had a thought against your honour …” In a word, I buttered her up till my lady was quite softened.… “I shall think highly of you,” she says.’ (He kept silent a minute, then the smile again appeared on his face.) ‘I know very well how to talk to the likes of them! Formerly, when I used to go out to work on my own, at times someone would come down hard on me; but only let me get in a word or two and I’d butter him up till he’d be as smooth as silk!’
‘Is it much money?’
‘Fifteen hundred rubles,’ carelessly replied Polikéy.
She shook her head.
‘When are you to go?’
‘ “To-morrow,” she says. “Take any horse you like,” she says, “call at the office, and then start and God be with you!” ’
‘The Lord be praised!’ said Akulína, rising and crossing herself. ‘May God help you, Polikéy,’ she added in a whisper, so that she might not be heard beyond the partition and holding him by his shirt-sleeve. ‘Polikéy, listen to me! I beseech you in the name of Christ our God: kiss the cross when you start, and promise that not a drop shall pass your lips.’
‘A likely thing!’ he ejaculated; ‘drink when carrying all that money! … Ah! how somebody was playing the piano up there! Fine!…’ he said, after a pause, and smiled. ‘I suppose it was the young lady. I was standing like this in front of the mistress, beside the whatnot, and the young lady was rattling away behind the door. She rattled and rattled on, fitting it together so pat! O my! Wouldn’t I like to play a tune! I’d soon master it, I would. I’m awfully good at that sort of thing.… Let me have a clean shirt to-morrow!’
And they went to bed happy.
V
MEANWHILE the meeting in front of the office had been noisy. The business before them was no trifle. Almost all the peasants were present. While the steward was with the mistress they kept their caps on, more voices were heard, and they talked more loudly. The hum of deep voices, interrupted at rare intervals by breathless, husky, and shrill tones, filled the air and, entering through the windows of the mistress’s house, sounded like the noise of a distant sea, making her feel a nervous agitation like that produced by a heavy thunderstorm – a sensation between fear and discomfort. She felt as if the voices might at any moment grow yet louder and faster and then something would happen. ‘As if it could not all be done quietly, peaceably, without disputing and shouting,’ she thought, ‘according to the Christian law of brotherly love and meekness!’
Many voices were speaking at once, but Theodore Rezún, the carpenter, shouted loudest. There were two grown-up young men in his family and he was attacking the Dútlovs. Old Dútlov was defending himself: he stepped forward from the crowd behind which he had at first been standing. Now spreading out his arms, now clutching his little beard, he sputtered and snuffled in such a way that it would have been hard for him to understand what he himself was saying. His sons and nephews – splendid fellows all of them – stood huddled behind him, and the old man resembled the mother-hen in the game of Hawk and Chickens. The hawk was Rezún; and not only Rezún, but all the men who had two grown lads in family, and the fathers of only sons, and almost the whole meeting, were attacking Dútlov. The point was that Dútlov’s brother had been recruited thirty years before, and that Dútlov wished therefore to be excused from taking his turn with the families in which there were three eligible young men, and wanted his brother’s service in the army to be reckoned to the credit of his family, so that it should be given the same chance as those in which there were only two young men; and that these families should all draw lots equally and the third recruit be chosen from among all of them. Besides Dútlov’s family there were four others in which there were three young men, but one was the village Elder’s family and the mistress had exempted him. From the second a recruit had been taken the year before, and from each of the remaining families a recruit was now being taken. One of them had not even come to this meeting, but his wife stood sorrowfully behind all the others, vaguely hoping that the wheel of fortune might somehow turn her way. The red-haired Román, the father of the other recruit, in a tattered coat – though he was not poor – hung his head and silently leaned against the porch, only now and then looking up attentively at anyone who raised his voice, and then hanging his head again. Misery seemed to breathe from his whole figure. Old Semën Dútlov was a man to whose keeping anyone who knew anything of him would have trusted hundreds and thousands of rubles. He was a steady, God-fearing, reliable man, and was the church Elder. Therefore the excitement he was now in was all the more striking.