Grigory kept a grocery, but that was only for the sake of appearances: in reality he sold vodka, cattle, hides, grain, and pigs; he traded in anything that came to hand, and when, for instance, magpies were wanted abroad for ladies' hats, he made thirty kopecks on every pair of birds; he bought timber for felling, lent money at interest, and altogether was a resourceful old man.
He had two sons. The elder, Anisim, served in the police as a detective and was rarely at home. The younger, Stepan, had gone in for trade and helped his father, but no great help was expected from him as he was weak in health and deaf; his wife Aksinya, a hand- some woman with a good figure, who wore a hat and carried a parasol on holidays, got up early and went to bed late, and ran about all day long, picking up her skirts and jingling her keys, going from the warehouse to the cellar and from there to the shop, and old Tzy- bukin looked at her good-humoredly while his eyes glowed, and at such moments he regretted she had not been married to his elder son instead of to the younger one, who was deaf, and obviously no judge of female beauty.
The old man had always had an inclination for family life, and he loved his family more than anything on earth, especially his elder son, the detective, and his daughter-in-law. Aksinya hali no sooner married the deaf son than she began to display an extraordinary gift for business, and knew who could be allowed to run up a bill and who could not; she kept the keys and would not trust them even to her husband; she rattled away at the abacus, looked at the horses' teeth like a peasant, and was always laughing or shouting; and whatever she did or said, the old man was simply delighted and mut- tered:
"Well done, daughter-in-law! Well done, my beauty!"
He had been a widower, but a year after his son's marriage he could not resist getting married himself. A girl was found for him, in a village twenty miles from Ukleyevo, Varvara Nikolaevna by name, no longer young, but good-looking, comely, and coming from a decent family. No sooner had she moved into a little room in the upper story than everything in the house seemed to brighten up as though new glass had been put into all the windows. The lamps gleamed before the icons, the tables were covered with snow-white cloths, plants with red buds made their appearance in the windows and in the front garden, and at dinner, instead of eating from a single bowl, each person had a separate plate set for him. Varvara Nikolaevna had a pleasant, friendly smile, and it seemed as though the whole hcuse were smiling too. Beggars and pilgrims, male and fe- male, began to come into the yard, a thing which had never happened in the past; the plaintive sing-song voices of the Ukleyevo peasant women and the apolo- getic coughs of weak, seedy-looking men, who had been dismissed from the factory for drunkenness were heard under the windows. Varvara helped them with money, with bread, with old clothes, and afterwards, when she felt more at home, began taking things out of the shop. One day the deaf man saw her take four ounces of tea and that disturbed him.
"Here, mother's taken four ounces of tea," he in- formed his father afterwards; "where is that to be entered?"
The old man made no reply but stood still and thought a moment, moving his eyebrows, and then went upstairs to his wife.
"Varvarushka, if you want anything out of the shop," he said affectionately, "take it, my dear. Take it and welcome; don't hesitate."
And the next day the deaf man, running across the yard, called to her:
"If there is anything you want, mother dear, help yourself."
There was something new, something gay and light- hearted in her ahns-giving, just as there was in the lamps before the icons and in the red flowers. When on the eve of a fast or during the local church festival, which lasted three days, they palmed off on the peasants tainted salt meat, smelling so strong it was hard to stand near the tub of it, and took scythes, caps, and their wives' ker- chiefs in pledge from the drunken men; when the factory hands, stupefied with bad vodka, lay rolling in the mud, and sin seemed to hover thick like a fog in the air, then it was a relief to think that up there in the house there was a gentle, neatly dressed woman who had nothing to do with salt meat or vodka; her charity had in those op- pressive, murky days the effect of a safety valve in a machine.
The days in Tzybukin's house were busy ones. Before the sun was up Aksinya was snorting as she washed in the outer room, and the samovar was boiling in the kitchen with a hum that boded no good. Old Grigory Petrovich, dressed in a long black jacket, cotton breeches and shiny top boots, looking a dapper little figure, walked about the rooms, tapping with his little heels like the father-in-law in the well-known song. The shop was opened. When it was daylight a racing droshky was brought up to the front door and the old man got jaun- tily into it, pulling his big cap down to his ears; and, looking at him, no one would have said he was fifty-six. His wife and daughter-in-law saw him off, and at such times when he had on a good, clean coat, and a huge black stallion that had cost three hundred rubles was harnessed to the droshky, the old man did not like the peasants to come up to him with their complaints and petitions; he hated the peasants and disdained them, and if he saw some peasants waiting at the gate, he would shout angrily:
"Why are you standing there? Move on." Or if it were a beggar, he would cry: "God will provide!"
He would drive off on business; his wife, in a dark dress and a black apron, tidied the rooms or helped in the kitchen. Aksinya attended to the shop, and from the yard could be heard the clink of bottles and of money, her laughter and loud talk, and the angry voices of customers whom she had offended; and at the same time it could be seen that the illicit sale of vodka was already going on in the shop. The deaf man sat in the shop, too, or walked about the street bareheaded, with his hands in his pockets looking absent-mindedly now at the houses, now at the sky overhead. Six times a day they had tea; four times a day they sat down to meals. And
in the evening they counted their takings, put them
down, went to bed, and slept soundly.
All the three cotton mills at Ukleyevo were connected by telephone with the houses of their owners—Hrymin Seniors, Hrymin Juniors, and Kostukov. A telephone was installed in the government office, too, but it soon went out of order when it started to swarm with bugs and cockroaches. The district elder was semiliterate and wrote every word in the official documents with a capital. But when the telephone went out of order he said:
"Yes, now we shall be badly off without a telephone."
The Hrymin Seniors were continually at law with the Juniors, and sometimes the Juniors quarreled among themselves and went to law, and their mill did not work for a month or two till they were reconciled again, and this was an entertainment for the people of Ukleyevo, as there was a great deal of talk and gossip on the occasion of each quarrel. On holidays Kostukov and the Juniors would go driving and they would dash about Ukleyevo and run down calves. Aksinya, dressed to kill and rus- tling her starched petticoats, used to promenade up and down the street near her shop; the Juniors would snatch her up and cany her off as though by force. Then old Tzybukin, too, would drive out to show his new horse and he would take Varvara with him.
In the evening, after these drives, when people were going to bed, an expensive concertina was played in the Juniors' yard and, if the moon was shining, those strains thrilled the heart, and Ukleyevo no longer seemed a wretched hole.