“Don’t be shy, Lyubov Alexandrovna!” Olga Mikhailovna shouted loudly enough for the other ladies to hear her and know she was with them. “Don’t be shy! You must learn! You’ll marry a Tolstoyan, and he’ll make you mow.”8
Lyubochka raised the scythe, but burst out laughing again and, weak from laughter, lowered it at once. She was embarrassed and pleased to be spoken to as a grown-up. Nata, not smiling and not embarrassed, with a cold, serious face, took the scythe, swung it, and got it tangled in the grass; Vata, also not smiling, cold and serious like her sister, silently took the scythe and stuck it into the ground. Having accomplished that, the two sisters linked arms and silently went off to the raspberry patch.
Pyotr Dmitrich laughed and frolicked like a little boy, and this childishly frolicksome mood, when he became exceedingly good-natured, suited him much more than any other. Olga Mikhailovna loved him like that. But his boyishness usually did not last long. And this time, too, having frolicked with the scythe, he found it necessary for some reason to give a serious tinge to his frolicking.
“When I’m mowing, I feel myself more healthy and normal,” he said. “If I were forced to be content only with intellectual life, I think I’d go out of my mind. I feel that I wasn’t born a cultivated man! I want to mow, to plow, to sow, to break in horses…”
And a conversation began between Pyotr Dmitrich and the ladies about the advantages of physical work, about culture, then about the harmfulness of money, of property. Listening to her husband, Olga Mikhailovna for some reason remembered about her dowry.
“The time will come,” she thought, “when he will not forgive me for being richer than he is. He’s proud and touchy. He may well come to hate me because he owes me so much.”
She stopped near Colonel Bukreev, who was eating raspberries and also taking part in the conversation.
“Come,” he said, making way for Olga Mikhailovna and Pyotr Dmitrich. “The ripest are here…And so, sir, according to Proudhon,” he went on, raising his voice, “property is theft.9 But I must confess that I don’t acknowledge Proudhon and don’t consider him a philosopher. For me the French have no authority, God help them!”
“Well, when it comes to these Proudhons and various Buckles, I’m a washout,” said Pyotr Dmitrich. “Concerning philosophy, address yourself to her, my spouse. She took some courses and knows all these Schopenhauers and Proudhons inside out…”10
Olga Mikhailovna felt bored again. She again went through the garden, down the narrow path, past the apple and pear trees, and again she looked as if she were going about a very important chore. Here was the gardener’s cottage…On the porch sat the gardener’s wife, Varvara, and her four small children with big, close-cropped heads. Varvara was also pregnant and was to give birth, by her calculations, around the day of Elijah the prophet.11 Having greeted her, Olga Mikhailovna silently looked at her and her children and asked:
“Well, how do you feel?”
“All right…”
Silence ensued. It was as if the two women silently understood each other.
“It’s scary giving birth for the first time,” Olga Mikhailovna said, after some thought. “I keep feeling I won’t come through it, I’ll die.”
“It seemed that way to me, too, but here I am alive…We imagine all sorts of things!”
Varvara, already pregnant for the fifth time and experienced, looked down somewhat on her mistress and spoke to her in a didactic tone, and Olga Mikhailovna could not help feeling her authority; she wanted to talk about her fear, about the baby, about her feelings, but she was afraid that to Varvara it would seem petty and naïve. And she kept silent and waited for Varvara to say something herself.
“Olya, let’s go home!” Pyotr Dmitrich called from the raspberry patch.
Olga Mikhailovna liked keeping silent, waiting, and looking at Varvara. She would have agreed to stand like that, silently and needlessly, until nightfall. But she had to go. She no sooner stepped away from the cottage than Lyubochka, Nata, and Vata came running to meet her. The latter two stopped a few feet away and stood as if rooted to the spot, but Lyubochka ran up to her and hung on her neck.
“My dearest! My darling! My precious!” She started kissing her face and neck. “Let’s go and have tea on the island!”
“On the island! On the island!” the identical Nata and Vata both said at once without smiling.
“But it’s going to rain, my dears.”
“It won’t, it won’t!” Lyubochka cried, making a tearful face. “Everybody’s agreed to go! My dearest, my darling!”
“They’re all going to go and have tea on the island,” said Pyotr Dmitrich, coming up. “Give the orders…We’ll all go by boat, and the samovars and the rest should be sent with the servants in a carriage.”
He walked beside his wife and took her under the arm. Olga Mikhailovna wanted to say something unpleasant to her husband, something sharp, maybe even to mention the dowry—the harsher the better, she felt. She thought a little and said:
“Why is it Count Alexei Petrovich didn’t come? Such a pity!”
“I’m very glad he didn’t come,” Pyotr Dmitrich lied. “That holy fool bores me stiff.”
“But you waited for him so impatiently before dinner!”
III
Half an hour later all the guests were already crowding on the bank by the piling where the boats were moored. They all talked and laughed a lot, and fussed about so much that they were unable to settle into the boats. Three boats were already crammed full of passengers, and two stood empty. The keys for these two had disappeared somewhere, and messengers kept running from the river to the house in search of them. Some said Grigory had the keys, others that they were with the steward, and a third group advised sending for a blacksmith and breaking the locks. They all talked at once, interrupting and drowning each other out. Pyotr Dmitrich paced up and down the bank and shouted:
“Devil knows what’s going on! The keys should always lie on the windowsill in the entryway! Who dared take them from there? The steward can get his own boat if he wants!”
The keys were finally found. Then it turned out that two oars were missing. There was more turmoil. Pyotr Dmitrich, who was bored with pacing up and down, jumped into a long, narrow dugout made from a poplar trunk, rocked, nearly fell into the water, and pushed off. One by one the other boats set out after him, to the loud laughter and shrieking of the young ladies.
The white cloudy sky, the riverbank trees, the bulrushes, and the boats with people and oars were reflected in the water as in a mirror; under the boats, far down in the depths, in the bottomless abyss, there was also a sky and flying birds. One bank, on which the manor house stood, was high, steep, and all covered with trees; on the other, gently sloping, wide water-meadows showed greenly and creeks glistened. The boats went some hundred yards and, beyond the mournfully drooping willows, on the sloping bank, appeared cottages and a herd of cows; there was singing, drunken shouting, and the sounds of a concertina.
Boats darted here and there on the river with fishermen going to set their nets for the night. In one little boat sat some reveling music-lovers, playing homemade violins and cellos.
Olga Mikhailovna sat at the tiller. She smiled affably and talked a lot to entertain her guests, while casting sidelong glances at her husband. He floated in his dugout ahead of everybody, standing and working one oar. His light, sharp-prowed little dugout, which the guests all called a deathtrap, and Pyotr Dmitrich for some reason called Penderaklia,12 raced along quickly; it had a lively, cunning expression and seemed to hate the heavy Pyotr Dmitrich, waiting for an appropriate moment to slip from under his feet. Olga Mikhailovna kept glancing at her husband, and was repulsed by his good looks, which everyone admired, the nape of his neck, his pose, his familiar manner with women; she hated all the women sitting in her boat, was jealous, and at the same time kept jumping every moment, afraid that the unsteady little dugout might turn over and cause a disaster.