Alyona came in and, bowing low to Vera, began
carrying out the armchairs to beat the dust out of them.
"A fine time you have chosen to do the room," said Vera, annoyed. "Go away!"
Alyona lost her head and in her terror could not grasp what was wanted of her. She began hurriedly tidying up the top of the chest of drawers.
"Go away, I tell you!" Vera shouted, turning cold; she had never felt so exasperated. "Go away!"
Alyona uttered a sort of birdlike moan and dropped Vera's gold watch on the carpet.
"Get out of here!" shrieked Vera in a voice not her jumping up and trembling all over. "Chase her off, she has worn me out!" she continued, walking rap- idly after Alyona down the passage and stamping her feet. "Get out! The rods! Flog her!"
Then suddenly she came to herself and just as she was, unwashed, uncombed, in her dressing-go^ and bedroom slippers, she rushed out of the house. She ran to the familiar ravine and hid herself there among the bramble bushes so as to see no one and be unseen. Lying there motionless on the grass, she did not weep, she was not horror-stricken, but staring at the sky open- eyed, she reflected coldly and clearly that something had happened which she could never forget and for which she could never forgive herself as long as she lived.
"No, enough, enough!" she thought. "It's time to take myself in hand or there'll be no end to it . . . Enough!"
At midday Dr. Neshchapov drove by the ravine on his way to the manor house. She saw him and quickly decided that she would begin a new life, that she would force herself to begin it, and this decision calmed her. And foUowing the doctor's well-built figure with her eyes, she said as though trying to soften the harshness of her decision, "He is nice. • . . We shall manage a life somehow."
She returned home. While she was dressing, Aunt Dasha came into the room and said, "Alyona upset you, darling; I have sent her home to the village. Her mother thrashed her within an inch of her life and came here crying."
"Auntie," said Vera quickly, "I am going to marry Dr. Neshchapov. Only talk to him yourself . . . I can't."
And again she went out into the fields. And wander- ing aimlessly about, she made up her mind that when she was married she would keep house, doctor the peas- ants, teach school, do all the things that other women of her circle did. And this constant dissatisfaction with herself and everyone else, this succession of bad mis- takes that loom up like a mountain before you when- ever you look back on your past, she would accept as her real life, her destiny, and she would expect nothing better. . . . And indeed, there is nothing better! Glori- ous nature, dreams, music, tell one story, but reality another. Evidently goodness and happiness exist some- where outside of life. . . . It is necessary not to live your separate life, but become at one with this luxurious steppe, boundless and indifferent as eternity, with its flowers, its ancient grave-mounds, and its spaciousness, and then all will be well.
A month later Vera was living at the iron works.
1897
Peasants
IKOLAY CHIKILDEYEV, a waiter in the
Moscow hotel, Slavyansky Bazar, had been taken ill. His legs went numb and his gait became unsteady, so that one day as he was going along the corridor, carry- ing an order of ham and peas on a tray, he stumbled and fell. He had to give up his job. Whatever money he and his wife had was spent on doctors and medicines; they had nothing left to live on; idleness weighed heav- ily upon him and he decided to go back to the village from which he had come. It was easier to be ill at horne, and it was cheaper living there; and not for nothing is it said that there is help in the walls of horne.
He arrived in his native Zhukovo toward evening. In his childhood the house in which he was born figured as a bright, cosy, comfortable place. But now, going into the log cabin, he was positively frightened: it was so dark and crowded and squalid. His wife Olga and his daughter Sasha, who had come with him, stared in bewilderment at the big dirty stove, which occupied almost half the room and was black with soot and flies. What a lot of flies! The stove was lopsided, the logs in the walls sloped, and it looked as though the cabin were about to collapse. In the corner, near the icons, bottle labels and scraps of newspaper were pasted on the walls instead of pictures. The poverty, the povertyI None of the grown-ups were at horne; all were at work, reaping. On the stove sat a flaxen-haired girl of eight, unwashed, apathetic; she did not even look up at the newcomers. Below, a white cat was rubbing itself against the oven fork.
"Pussy, pussy!" Sasha called to it coaxingly. "Pussy!"
"It can't hear," said the little girl; "it's gone deaf."
"Why?"
"Oh, it was hit."
Nikolay and Olga realized at first glance what life was like here, but said nothing to each other; silently they put down their bundles, and silently went out intc the village street. Their cabin was the third from the end and seemed the poorest and oldest-looking; the second was not much better; but the last one had an iron roof and curtains at the windows. That cottage stood apart, and was not enclosed; it was a tavern. The cabins were all in a single row, and the entire little village—quiet and pensive, with willows, elders, and mountain ash peeping out from the courtyards—had a pleasant look.
Behind the peasant homesteads the ground sloped do^ to the river steeply and precipitously, so that huge boulders jutted out here and there through the clay. On the steep slope paths wound among the stones and pits dug by the potters; pieces of broken pottery, brown and red, lay about in heaps, and below there stretched a broad, level, bright-green meadow, already mown, over which the peasants' cattle were now wan- dering. The river, two thirds of a mile from the village, ran, twisting and turning, between beautiful wooded banks. Beyond it was another broad meadow, a herd of cattle, long files of white geese; then, just as on the hither side, there was a steep rise, and at the top of it, on a ridge, a village with a church that had five domes, and, at a little distance, a manor house.
"It's nice here!" said Olga, crossing herself at the sight of the church. "Lord, what space!"
Just at that moment the bells began ringing for ves- pers (it was Saturday evening). Two little girls, down below, who were carrying a pail of water, looked round at the church to listen to the chimes.
"About this time they are serving the dinners at the Slavyansky Bazar," said Nikolay dreamily.
Sitting on the edge of the ravine, Nikolay and Olga watched the sunset, and saw how the gold and crimson sky was reflected in the river, in the church windows, and in the very air, which was soft and still and inex- pressibly pure, as it never was in Moscow. And when the sun had set, the herds went past, bleating and bel- lowing; geese flew across from the other side of the river, and then all was hushed; the soft light faded from the air, and dusk began its rapid descent.
Meanwhile Nikolay's father and mother, two gaunt, bent, toothless old people, of the same height, had re- turned. The daughters-in-law, Marya and Fyokla, who had been working on the estate across the river, came home, too. Marya, the wife of Nikolay's brother Kiryak, had six children, and Fyokla, the wife of his brother Denis, who was in the army, had two; and when Niko- lay, stepping into the cabin, saw the whole family, all those bodies big and little stirring on the sleeping plat- forms, in the cradles and in all the corners, and when he saw the greed with which his old father and the women ate the black bread, dipping it in water, it was borne in upon him that he had made a mistake in coming here, sick, penniless, and with a family, too— a mistake!