The yard was a wretched place. Here and there lay old blackened manure left after carting, and on this lay in disorder a rotting block, a pitchfork, and two harrows. The penthouse round the yard had almost no thatch left on the roof, and one side had fallen in so that the rafters no longer lay on the fork-posts but on the manure. On the other side stood a wooden plough, a cart lacking a wheel, and a heap of empty, useless beehives piled one on another. Chúris, with the edge and head of his axe, was getting the wattle wall clear from the roof which had crushed it. Iván Chúris was a peasant of about fifty, below the average height. His tanned, oval face, surrounded by a dark brown beard streaked with grey and thick hair of the same colour, was handsome and expressive. His dark blue half-closed eyes were intelligent and carelessly good-natured, and when he smiled his small regular mouth, sharply defined under his scanty brown moustache, expressed calm self-confidence and a certain ironical indifference to his surroundings. The coarseness of his skin, his deep wrinkles, the sharply marked sinews of his neck, face, and arms, the unnatural stoop of his shoulders, and his crooked bandy legs, showed that his life had been spent in labour beyond his strength. He wore thick white hempen trousers patched with blue on the knees, a dirty shirt of the same material torn at the back and arms, and a low girdle of tape, from which hung a brass key.
‘Good-day,’ said Nekhlyúdov as he entered the yard.
Chúris looked round and then continued his work, and only when he had cleared the wattle from under the roof by an energetic effort did he stick his axe into a log, adjust his girdle, and come out into the middle of the yard.
‘A pleasant holiday, your honour!’ he said, bowing low and then shaking back his hair.
‘Thank you, friend. You see I’ve come to look at your allotment,’ said Nekhlyúdov, looking at the peasant’s garb with boyish friendliness and timidity. ‘Let me see why you want those props you asked me for at the meeting of the Commune.’
‘The props? Why, you know what props are for, your honour! I’d like to prop things up a bit: there, please see for yourself. Only the other day this corner fell in – but thank God the cattle were not inside at the time. Things hardly hold together,’ said Chúris, looking contemptuously at his unthatched, crooked, and dilapidated sheds. ‘The rafters, gable-ends, and cross-pieces now, if you only touch them you won’t find a single piece of timber that’s any use. And where’s a man to get timber from nowadays – you know yourself.’
‘Then what use would five props be to you, when one shed has fallen in and the others will soon do so? You don’t need props, but new rafters, cross-pieces, and uprights,’ said the master, evidently parading his knowledge of the subject.
Chúris was silent.
‘So what you need is timber and not props. You should have said so.’
‘Of course I want timber, but there’s nowhere to get it. It won’t do to keep going to the master’s house! If the likes of us were allowed to get into the habit of coming to your honour’s house for everything we need, what sort of serfs should we be? But if you will be merciful concerning the oak posts that are lying unused on your threshing-floor,’ he added, bowing and shifting from foot to foot, ‘I might be able to change some of the pieces, cut away others, and fix things up somehow with the old stuff.’
‘With the old stuff? Don’t you yourself say that it’s all old and rotten? To-day this corner falls in, to-morrow that, the day after a third: so if you are to do anything you must rebuild it altogether that the work may not be wasted. Tell me, do you think your place could stand through this winter or not?’
‘Who can tell?’
‘But what do you think? Will it fall in or not?’
Chúris considered.
‘It will all fall in,’ he said suddenly.
‘There, you see you should have said at the meeting that you need to rebuild the whole homestead, and not only put in a few props. You know I should be glad to help you …’
‘We’re very grateful for your favour,’ Chúris replied suspiciously, and without looking at the master. ‘If you would only favour me with four beams and some props I could perhaps fix things up myself; and the rotten wood I’d take out and use for supports in the hut.’
‘Then is your hut in a bad state too?’
‘My old woman and I are expecting from day to day that it will crush someone,’ Chúris remarked indifferently. ‘The other day she did get crushed by a strut from the ceiling.’
‘Crushed? What do you mean?’
‘Why, your honour, it hit her on the back so that she lay more dead than alive till night-time.’
‘Well, and has she recovered?’
‘Yes, she’s recovered, but she’s always ailing. It’s true that she’s been sickly since her birth.’
‘What, are you ill?’ Nekhlyúdov asked the woman who was still standing in the doorway and had begun groaning as soon as her husband mentioned her.
‘Just here it never leaves me,’ she said, pointing to her dirty emaciated chest.
‘Again!’ said Nekhlyúdov, shrugging his shoulders with vexation. ‘Why don’t you go to the dispensary when you’re ill? That’s what the dispensary is for. Haven’t you been told of it?’
‘We have, master, but I’ve no time. There’s the obligatory work on the estate, our own work, and the children, and I’m all alone. We are lone people.’
Chapter III
NEKHLYÚDOV went into the hut. The uneven smoke-begrimed walls of one end of the room had all sorts of rags and clothing hanging up on them, and the best corner was literally covered with reddish cockroaches that had collected round the icon and the benches. In the middle of the black, smelly, fourteen-foot-square hovel, there was a large crack in the ceiling, which though propped up in two places was bulging so that it threatened to collapse at any moment.
‘Yes, the hut is very bad,’ said Nekhlyúdov, looking straight at Chúris, who did not seem inclined to begin speaking about this state of things.
‘It will crush us and will crush the children,’ muttered the woman in a tearful voice, leaning against the brick oven under the bunks.
‘Don’t you talk,’ Chúris said sternly, and with a subtle smile showing slightly under his moustache he turned to the master. ‘I can’t think what could be done to it, your honour – to the hut. I have put up props and boards, but nothing can be done.’
‘How are we to live through the winter here? Oh, oh, oh!’ said the woman.
‘If we put up some more props and new struts,’ her husband interrupted her with a quiet business-like expression, ‘and changed one of the rafters, we might somehow get through the winter. We might get along – only the props will crowd the hut, that’s all. But if we touch it, there won’t be a sound bit left. It’s only as long as it’s not touched that it holds together,’ he concluded, evidently well pleased to have realized that fact.
Nekhlyúdov was vexed and grieved that Chúris had let himself come to such a pass and had not applied to him sooner, for ever since his arrival he had never refused help to a peasant, and only tried to get them to come straight to him with their troubles. He even felt a sort of animosity against Chúris, and angrily shrugged his shoulders and frowned; but the sight of the wretchedness around him and Chúris’s quiet, self-satisfied appearance in the midst of it, changed his vexation into a melancholy feeling of hopelessness.
‘Now why didn’t you tell me sooner, Iván?’ he said reproachfully, sitting down on the dirty crooked bench.
‘I daren’t, your honour,’ Chúris replied with the same barely perceptible smile, shifting from one dirty bare foot to the other on the uneven earth floor, but he said this so boldly and calmly that it was hard to believe that he had not dared to apply to his master.