Suddenly it all flew to pieces. They were poor.
4
In the summer of 1903, Yura and his uncle were riding in a tarantass and pair over the fields to Duplyanka, the estate of Kologrivov, the silk manufacturer and great patron of the arts, to see Ivan Ivanovich Voskoboinikov, a pedagogue and popularizer of useful knowledge.
It was the feast of the Kazan Mother of God,3 the thick of the wheat harvest. Either because it was lunchtime or on account of the feast day, there was not a soul in the fields. The sun scorched the partly reaped strips like the half-shaven napes of prisoners. Birds circled over the fields. Its ears drooping, the wheat drew itself up straight in the total stillness or stood in shocks far off the road, where, if you stared long enough, it acquired the look of moving figures, as if land surveyors were walking along the edge of the horizon and taking notes.
“And these,” Nikolai Nikolaevich asked Pavel, a handyman and watchman at the publishing house, who was sitting sideways on the box, stooping and crossing his legs, as a sign that he was not a regular coachman and driving was not his calling, “are these the landowner’s or the peasants’?”
“Them’s the master’s,” Pavel replied, lighting up, “and them there,” having lighted up and inhaled, he jabbed with the butt of the whip handle towards the other side and said after a long pause, “them there’s ours. Gone to sleep, eh?” he shouted at the horses every so often, glancing at their tails and rumps out of the corner of his eye, like an engineer watching a pressure gauge.
But the horses pulled like all horses in the world; that is, the shaft horse ran with the innate directness of an artless nature, while the outrunner seemed to the uncomprehending to be an arrant idler, who only knew how to arch its neck like a swan and do a squatting dance to the jingling of the harness bells, which its own leaps set going.
Nikolai Nikolaevich was bringing Voskoboinikov the proofs of his little book on the land question, which, in view of increased pressure from the censorship, the publisher had asked him to revise.
“Folk are acting up in the district,” said Nikolai Nikolaevich. “In the Pankovo area they cut a merchant’s throat and a zemstvo man4 had his stud burned down. What do you think of that? What are they saying in your village?”
But it turned out that Pavel took an even darker view of things than the censor who was restraining Voskoboinikov’s agrarian passions.
“What’re they saying? Folk got free and easy. Spoiled, they say. Can you do that with our kind? Give our muzhiks their head, they’ll throttle each other, it’s God’s truth. Gone to sleep, eh?”
This was the uncle and nephew’s second trip to Duplyanka. Yura thought he remembered the way, and each time the fields spread out wide, with woods embracing them in front and behind in a narrow border, it seemed to Yura that he recognized the place where the road should turn right, and at the turn there would appear and after a moment vanish the seven-mile panorama of Kologrivovo, with the river glistening in the distance and the railroad running beyond it. But he kept being mistaken. Fields were succeeded by fields. Again and again they were embraced by woods. The succession of these open spaces tuned you to a vast scale. You wanted to dream and think about the future.
Not one of the books that were later to make Nikolai Nikolaevich famous had yet been written. But his thoughts were already defined. He did not know how near his hour was.
Soon he was to appear among the representatives of the literature of that time, university professors and philosophers of the revolution—this man who had thought over all their themes and who, apart from terminology, had nothing in common with them. The whole crowd of them held to some sort of dogma and contented themselves with words and appearances, but Father Nikolai was a priest who had gone through Tolstoyism and revolution5 and kept going further all the time. He thirsted for a wingedly material thought, which would trace an impartially distinct path in its movement and would change something in the world for the better, and which would be noticeable even to a child or an ignoramus, like a flash of lightning or a roll of thunder. He thirsted for the new.
Yura felt good with his uncle. He resembled his mother. He was a free spirit, as she had been, with no prejudice against anything inhabitual. Like her, he had an aristocratic feeling of equality with all that lived. He understood everything at first glance, just as she had, and was able to express his thoughts in the form in which they came to him at the first moment, while they were alive and had not lost their meaning.
Yura was glad that his uncle was taking him to Duplyanka. It was very beautiful there, and the picturesqueness of the place also reminded him of his mother, who had loved nature and had often taken him on walks with her. Besides that, Yura was pleased that he would again meet Nika Dudorov, a high school boy who lived at Voskoboinikov’s and probably despised him for being two years younger, and who, when greeting him, pulled his hand down hard and bowed his head so low that the hair fell over his forehead, covering half his face.
5
“The vital nerve of the problem of pauperism,” Nikolai Nikolaevich read from the corrected manuscript.
“I think it would be better to say ‘essence,’ ” Ivan Ivanovich said, and introduced the required correction into the proofs.
They were working in the semidarkness of the glassed-in terrace. The eye could make out watering cans and gardening tools lying around in disorder. A raincoat was thrown over the back of a broken chair. In a corner stood rubber hip boots with dry mud stuck to them, their tops hanging down to the floor.
“Meanwhile, the statistics of deaths and births show …” Nikolai Nikolaevich dictated.
“We need to put in ‘for the year under review,’ ” Ivan Ivanovich said, and wrote it in.
The terrace was slightly drafty. Pieces of granite lay on the pages of the brochure so that they would not fly away.
When they finished, Nikolai Nikolaevich hurried to go home.
“There’s a storm coming. We must be on our way.”
“Don’t even think of it. I won’t let you. We’ll have tea now.”
“I absolutely must be in town by evening.”
“Nothing doing. I won’t hear of it.”
The fumes of the lighted samovar came drifting from the garden, drowning the scent of nicotiana and heliotrope. Sour cream, berries, and cheesecakes were brought there from the cottage. Suddenly word came that Pavel had gone to bathe in the river and taken the horses with him for a bath. Nikolai Nikolaevich had to give in.
“Let’s go to the bluff and sit on a bench while they set out tea,” Ivan Ivanovich suggested.
Ivan Ivanovich, by right of friendship with the rich Kologrivov, occupied two rooms in the steward’s cottage. This little house with its adjoining garden stood in a dark, neglected part of the park with an old semicircular driveway. The driveway was thickly overgrown with grass. There was no movement on it now, and it was used only for hauling dirt and construction trash to the ravine, which served as a dry dump site. A man of progressive ideas and a millionaire who sympathized with revolution, Kologrivov himself was presently abroad with his wife. Only his daughters Nadya and Lipa were living on the estate, with their governess and a small staff of servants.
The steward’s little garden was set off from the rest of the park, with its ponds and lawns and manor house, by a thick hedge of black viburnum. Ivan Ivanovich and Nikolai Nikolaevich skirted this growth from outside, and, as they walked, the sparrows that swarmed in the viburnum flew out in identical flocks at identical intervals. This filled the hedge with a monotonous noise, as if water were flowing along it through a pipe ahead of Ivan Ivanovich and Nikolai Nikolaevich.