They went into the church. Marya stood in the en- trance and did not dare to go farther. Nor did she dare to sit do^ either, though they only began ringing for Mass after eight o'clock. She remained standiag whole time.
While the gospel was being read the crowd suddenly parted to make way for the squire's family. Two young ladies in white frocks and wide-brimmed hats walked in, and with them was a chubby, rosy boy in a sailor suit. Their appearance moved Olga; she concluded at first glance that they were decent, elegant, cultivated people. But Marya glared at them from under her brows, sullenly, dejectedly, as though they were not human beings but monsters who might crush her if she did not move aside.
And every time the deacon intoned in his bass voice, she imagined that she heard the cry, "Ma-arya!" and she shuddered.
m
The arrival of the guests bec^e known in the vil- lage, and directly after Mass a great many people as- sembled in the cabin. The Leonychevs and the Matvei- chevs and the Ilyichovs came to make inquiries about relatives of theirs who had situations in Moscow. All the lads of Zhukovo who could read and write were packed off to Moscow and hired out as bellboys or waiters (just as the lads from the village on the other side of the river all apprenticed to bakers), and this had been the custom from the days of serfdom, long ago, when a cer- tain Luka lvanych, a peasant from Zhukovo, now a legendary figure, who had been a bartender in one of the Moscow clubs, would take none but his fellow vil- lagers into his service, and these in turn, as they got up in the world, sent for their kinsfolk and found jobs for them in taverns and restaurants; and from that time on the village of Zhukovo was known throughout the coun- tryside round about as Flunkeyville or Toadytown. Niko- lay had been taken to Moscow when he was eleven, and gotten a situation by Ivan Makarych, a Matveichev, who was then an attendant at the Hermitage garden restaurant. And now, addressing the Matveichevs, Nik- olay said unctuously:
"Ivan Makarych is my benefactor, and I am bound to pray for him day and night, because it was he who set me on the right path."
"God bless you!" a tall old woman, the sister of Ivan Makarych, said tearfully, "and not a word have we heard about him, the dear man."
"Last winter he was in service at Omon's, and there was a rumor that this season he was somewhere out of town, in a garden restauiant. He has aged! Why, it used to be that he would bring home as much as ten rubles a day in the summertime, but now things are very quiet everywhere. It's hard on the old man."
The women and the old crones looked at Nikolay's feet, shod in felt boots, and at his pale face, and said mournfully:
"You're no breadwinner, Nikolay Osipych; you're no breadwinner! No, indeed!"
And they all fondled Sasha. She was going on eleven, but she was small and very thin, and she looked no more than seven. Among the other little girls, with their sun- burnt faces and roughly cropped hair, and their long, faded shifts, she, with her pallor, her big dark eyes and the red ribbon in her hair, looked droll, as though she were som!'! little wild thing that had been caught in the fields and brought into the cabin.
"She can read, too," said Olga, looking tenderly at her daughter and showing her off. "Read a little, child!" she said, taking the Gospels from the corner. "You read, and the good Christian folk will listen."
It was an old, heavy volume in a leather binding dog-eared edges, and it gave off a smell as though monks had come into the house. Sasha raised her eye- brows and began in a loud singsong:
" 'And when they were departed, behold, the angel of the Lord . . . appeareth to Joseph in a dream, say- ing, Arise, and take the young child and his mother ...' "
" 'The young child and his mother,'" Olga repeated, and flushed all over with emotion.
" 'And flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child, to de- stroy him . . .' "
At these words Olga could not contain herself and burst into tears. Afected by her example, Marya began to whimper, and then Ivan Makarych's sister followed suit. The old man coughed and bustled about looking for a present for his granddaughter, but finding nothing, gave it up with a wave of his hand. And when the read- ing was over the neighbors dispersed to their homes, deeply moved and very much pleased with Olga and Sasha.
Because of the holiday, the family stayed home all day. The old woman, whom her husband, her daughters- in-law, her grandchildren, all alike called Granny, al- ways tried to do everything herself; she lit the stove and heated the samovar with her own hands, even carried the midday meal to the men in the fields, and then com- plained that she was worn out with work. And all the ^rne she fretted for fear that someone should eat a bite too much or that her husband and daughters-in-law should sit idle. Now she would hear the tavern'L:eeper's geese making for her kitchen garden by the back way, and she would run out of the cabin with a long stick and spend half an hour screaming beside her cabbages which were as meager and flabby as herself; again she would imagine that a crow was after her chickens and would rush at it with loud words of abuse. She was cross and full of complaints from morning till night, and often raised such a hubbub that passers-by stopped in the street.
She treated the old man roughly, calling him a lazy- bones and a plague. He was a shiftless, undependable man, and perhaps if she had not been prodding him con- tinually he would not have worked at all, but would just have sat on the stove and talked. He told his son at great length about certain enemies of his, complained of the injuries he suffered every day at the hands of the neighbors, and it was tedious to listen to him.
"Yes," he would hold forth, with his arms akimbo, "yes— A week after the Exaltation of the Cross I sold my hay at thirty kopecks a pood, of my own free will. Yes, well and good. So you see I was taking the hay in the morning of my own free will; I wasn't doing no one no harm. In an unlucky hour I see the village headman, Antip Sedelnikov, coming out of the tavern. 'Where are you taking it, you blank blank?' says he, and fetches me a box on the ear."
Kiryak had a terrible hangover and was ashamed to face his brother.
'What vodka will do! Oh, my God!" he muttered as he shook his throbbing head. "For Christ's sake, for- give me, dear brother and sister; I'm not happy about it myself."
Because it was a holiday, they bought a herring at the tavern and made a soup of the herring head. At midday they sat down to have tea and went on drinking it until they were all perspiring; they looked actually swollen with tea; and then they attacked the soup, all helping themselves out of one pot. The herring itself Granny hid away.
In the evening a potter was firing pots on the slope.
Down below in the meadow the girls got up a round dance and sang songs. Someone played an accordion. On the other side of the river, too, one kiln was going, and the girls sang songs, and in the distance the singing sounded soft and melodious. In and about the tavern the peasants were making a racket. They sang with drunken voices, discordantly, and swore at one another so filthily that Olga could only shudder and repeat:
"Oh, holy saints!"
What amazed her was that the swearing was inces- sant, and that the old men who were near their end were the loudest and most persistent in using this foul language. And the girls and children listened to the swearing without turning a hair; it was evident that they had been used to it from their cradles.
It got to be past midnight, the fire in the kilns on both sides of the river died down, but in the meadow below and in the tavern the merrymaking continued. The old man and Kiryak, both drunk, walking arm in arm, their shoulders jostling, went up to the shed where Olga and Marya were lying.
"Let her be," the old man pleaded; '1et her be— She's a harmless woman— It's a sin—"