Olga Mihailovna was sitting on the hither side of the fence near the shanty. The sun was hidden behind the clouds. The trees and the air were frowning as before rain, but in spite of that it was hot and stifling. The hay cut under the trees on the previous day was lying un- gathered, looking melancholy, with here and there a patch of color from the faded flowers, and from it came a heavy, sickly scent. It was still. On the other side of the fence there was a monotonous hum of bees. . . .
Suddenly she heard footsteps and voices; someone was coming along the path towards the apiary.
"How stifling it is!" said a feminine voice. "What do you think—is it going to rain, or not?"
"It is going to rain, my charmer, but not before night,'' a very familiar male voice answered languidly. "There will be a good rain."
Olga Mihailovna figured that if she made haste to hide in the shanty they would pass by without seeing her, and she would not have to talk and to force heiself to smile. She picked up her skirts, bent down, and crept into the shanty. At once she felt upon her face, her neck, her arms, the hot air as heavy as steam. If it had not been for the stuffiness and the close smell of rye bread, fennel, and brushwood, which prevented her from breathing freely, it would have been delightful to hide from her visitors here under the thatched roof in the dusk, and to think about the little creature. It was cozy and quiet.
"What a pretty spot!" said a feminine voice. "Let us sit here, Pyotr Dmitrich."
Olga Mihailovna began peeping through a crack be- tween two branches. She saw her husband, Pyotr Dmi- trich, and Lubochka Scheller, a girl of seventeen who had recently left boarding-school. Pyotr Dmitrich, with his hat on the back of his head, languid and indolent from having drunk so much at dinner, slouched past the fence and raked the hay into a heap with his foot;
Lubochka, pink with the heat and pretty as ever, stood with her hands behind her, watching the lazy move- ments of his big handsome body.
Olga Mihailovna knew that her husband was attrac- tive to women, and did not like to see him with them. There was nothing out of the way in Pyotr Dmitrich's lazily raking together the hay in order to sit down on it with Lubochka and chatter to her of trivialities; there was nothing out of the way, either, in pretty Lubochka's looking at him meekly; but yet Olga Mihailovna felt vexed with her husband and frightened and pleased that she could eavesdrop.
"Sit do^, enchantress," said Pyotr Dmitrich, sinking down on the hay and stretching. "That's right. Come, tell me something."
"What next! If I begin telling you anything you wiU go to sleep."
"Me go to sleep? Allah forbid! Can I go to sleep while eyes like yours are watching me?"
In her husband's words, and in the fact that he was lolling with his hat on the back of his head in the pres- ence of a lady, there was nothing out of the way either. He was spoiled by women, knew that they found him attractive, and had adopted with them a special tone which everyone said suited him. With Lubochka he be- haved as with all women. But, all the same, Olga Mi- hailovna was jealous.
"Tell me, please," said Lubochka, after a brief si- lence, "is it true that you are to be tried for something?"
"I? Yes, I am numbered among the transgressors, my charmer.
"But what for?"
"For nothing, just so . . . it's chiefly a question of politics," ya^ed Pyotr Dmitrich, "the antagonisms of Left and Right. I, an obscurantist and reactionary, ven- tured in an official paper to make use of an expression offensive to such immaculate Gladstones as Vladimir Pavlovich Vladimirov and our local justice of the peace, Kuzma Grigorich Vostryakov."
Pyotr Dmitrich yawned again and went on:
"And it is the way with us that you may express dis- approval of the sun or the moon, or anything you like, but God preserve you from touching the Liberals! Heaven forbid! A Liberal is like the horrid dry fungus which covers you with a cloud of dust if you accidentally touch it with your finger."
'What happened to you?"
"Nothing particular. The whole flare-up started from the merest trifle. A teacher, a detestable person of clerical associations, hands to Vostryakov a petition against a tavern-keeper, charging him with insulting language and behavior in a public place. Everything suggests that both the teacher and the tavern-keeper were drunk as cobblers and that they behaved equally badly. If there had been insulting behavior, the insult had anyway been mutual. Vostryakov ought to have fined them both for a breach of the peace and have turned them out of the court—that is all. But that's not uur way of doing things. With us what stands first is not the person—not the fact itself, but the trademark and label. However great a rascal a teacher may be, he is always in the right because he is a teacher; a tavern-keeper is always in the wrong because he is a tavern-keeper and a moneygrubber. Vostryakov placed the tavern-keeper under arrest. The man appealed to the Circuit Court; the Circuit Court triumphantly up- held Vostryakov's decision. Well, I stuck to my own opinion. , . . Got a little hot. . . . That was all."
Pyotr Dmitrich spoke calmly with careless irony. In reality the trial that was hanging over him worried him extremely. Olga Mihailovna remembered how on his re- turn from the unfortunate session he had tried to con. ceal from his household how troubled he was and how dissatisfied with himself. As an intelligent man he could not help feeling that he had gone too far in expressing his disagreement; and how much lying had been need- ful to conceal that feeling from himself and from others! How many unnecessary conversations there had been! How much grumbling and insincere laughter at what was not laughable! When he learned that he was to be brought up before the Court, he suddenly felt very tired and depressed; he began to sleep badly, stood oftener than ever at the windows, drumming on the panes with his fingers. And he was ashamed to let his wife see that he was worried, and it vexed her.
"Is it true, as they say, that you've been to the prov- ince of Poltava?" Lubochka asked him.
"Yes," answered Pyotr Dmitrich. "I came back the day before yesterday."
"I expect it is very nice there."
"Yes, it is very nice, very nice indeed; in fact, I ar- rived just in time for the haymaking, I must tell you, and in the Ukraine the haymaking is the most poetical moment of the year. Here we have a big house, a big garden, a lot of servants, and a lot going on, so that you don't see the haymaking; here it all passes unnoticed. There, at the farm, I have a meadow of forty acres as flat as my hand. You can see the men mowing from any window you stand at. They are mowing in the meadow, they are mowing in the garden. There are no visitors, no fuss nor hurry either, so that you can't help seeing, feeling, hearing nothing but the haymaking. There is a smell of hay indoors and outdoors. There's the sound of the scythes from sunrise to sunset. Altogether Little Russia is a charming country. Would you believe it, when I was drinking water from the rustic wells and filthy vodka in some Jew's tavern, when on quiet eve- nings the strains of the Little Russian fiddle and the tambourines reached me, I was tempted by a fasci- nating idea—to settle down on my place and live there as long as I chose, far away from Circuit Courts, intel- lectual conversations, philosophizing women, long din- ners. . . ."
Pyotr Dmitrich was not lying. He was unhappy and ieaHy longed for a rest. And he had visited his Poltava property simply to avoid seeing his study, his servants, his acquaintances, and everything that could remind him of his wounded vanity and his mistakes.
Lubochka suddenly jumped up and waved her hands about in horror. "Oh! A bee, a bee!" she shrieked. "It will sting!"
"Nonsense; it won't sting," said Pyotr Dmitrich. "What a coward you are!"
"No, no, no," cried Lubochka; and looking round at the bees, she walked rapidly back.