VII
HE alighted at the fourth station and hired a conveyance. At first the peasant drivers demanded seven rubles—it was twelve versts to Kazakovo—then they came down to five and a half. At last one of them said: “Give me a three-ruble note and I’ll drive you; otherwise, ’tis not worth wagging your tongue about. Times nowadays are not what they used to be.” But he was unable to maintain that tone, and added the customary phrase: “And, besides, fodder is dear.” And he drove, after all, for a ruble and a half. The mud was fathomless, impassable, the cart was tiny, the wretched little nag, barely alive, was as long-eared as an ass and extremely weak. When they had slowly emerged from the courtyard of the station, the peasant, seated on the side-rail, began to get impatient and jerked the rope reins as if he longed with his whole being to aid the horse. At the station he had bragged “She can’t be held back,” and now he evidently felt ashamed. But the worst part of it all was—the man himself. Young, huge of build, fairly plump, he was clad in bast-shoes and white leg-wrappers, a short kazak coat girt with a strip of cloth, and an old peaked cap on his straight yellow hair. He emitted the smoky odour out of a chimneyless hut and of hemp—a regular husbandman of olden times, with a white beardless face, a swollen throat and a hoarse voice.
“What’s your name?” inquired Kuzma.
“I’m called Akhvanasiy.”
“Akhvanasiy!” said Kuzma angrily to himself. “And what else?”
“Menshoff.—Ho, get up there, antichrist!”
“Is it the evil malady?” And Kuzma indicated his throat with a nod.
“Well, yes, it is,” mumbled Menshoff, turning his eyes aside. “I’ve been drinking cold kvas.”
“Does it hurt you to swallow?”
“To swallow?—no, it doesn’t hurt—”
“Well, anyway, don’t talk unnecessarily,” said Kuzma sternly. “You’d better go to the hospital as soon as you can. Married, I suppose?”
“Yes, I’m married....”
“Well, there, now, you see. You’ll have children, and you’ll be making them all a famous present!”
“Just as sure as giving them a drink,” assented Menshoff. And, waxing impatient, he began to jerk the reins again. “Ho, get up there. You’re an unmanageable brute, antichrist!” At last he abandoned this futile effort and calmed down. For a long time he maintained silence, then suddenly inquired: “Have they assembled that Duma yet, merchant?”
“Yes.”
“And they do say that Makaroff is still alive, only they don’t want it known.”
Kuzma merely shrugged his shoulders: the devil only knew what these steppe men had in their heads! “But what wealth is here!” he said to himself, as he sat miserably on a tuft of straw, his knees drawn up on the bare floor of the springless cart, covered with a coarse cloth used for wrapping grain. He surveyed the road. The weather had grown still colder; still more gloomily the storm-clouds from the northwest came sailing over this black loam region, saturated with rains. The mud on the roads was bluish, greasy; the green of the trees, of the grass, of the vegetable gardens was dark and dense; and over everything lay that bluish tint of the black loam and the storm-clouds. But the cottages were of clay, tiny, with roofs of manure. Alongside them stood dried-up water casks. Of course, the water in them contained tadpoles.
Here was a well-to-do farmstead. In the vegetable garden, behind old bushes, an apiary, and a tiny orchard of three or four wild apple-trees, rose an old, dark-hued grain rick. The stable, the gate, and the cottage were all under one roof, thatched with hackled straw. The cottage was of brick, in two sections, the dividing line marked out with chalk: on one side was a pole surmounted by a forked branch, a fir-tree; on the other was something resembling a cock. The small windows were also rimmed with chalk in a toothed pattern. “There’s creative genius for you!” grinned Kuzma. “The stone age, God forgive me—the times of the cave men!” On the doors of the detached sheds were crosses sketched in charcoal; by the porch stood a large tombstone, obviously prepared in anticipation of death by grandfather or grandmother. Yes, truly, a well-to-do farmstead. But the mud round about was knee deep; a pig was reclining on the porch, and on top of him, balancing itself and flapping its wings, a yellow chicken was parading. The windows were tiny, and in the part of the cottage appropriated to human occupation, darkness and eternally cramped conditions must inevitably reign—the sleeping shelf on top of the oven, the loom for weaving, a good-sized oven, a trough filled with slops. And the family would be large, with many children, and in winter time there would be lambs and calves as well. And the dampness and the charcoal fumes would be such that a green vapour must hang over all. The children would whimper and howl when slapped on the nape of the neck; the sisters-in-law would revile one another (“May the lightning smite you, you roving, homeless cur!”) and each express the hope that the other might “choke on a bite on the Great Day”;[28] the aged mother-in-law would be incessantly hurling something—the oven-fork, the bowls—and rushing at her daughters-in-law, her sleeves tucked up on her dark, sinewy arms, and wearing herself out with shrill scolding, besprinkling now one of them, now another with saliva and curses. The old man, ugly-tempered and ailing, would wear them all to exhaustion with his exhortations, would drag his married sons by the hair; and sometimes they would weep, in the repulsive peasant way.
“Whose farm is this?” asked Kuzma. “The Krasnoffs’,” answered Menshoff, adding, “All of them are sick with it, too.”
Beyond the Krasnoff farm they drove out on to the pasturage. The village was large, and so was the common for pasture. The annual Fair was being arranged on it. The framework of booths already rose aloft here and there, and there were piles of wheels and pottery; a hastily constructed oven was smoking, and a smell of fritters hung in the air; the travelling caravan-wagon of some gypsies loomed grey on the plain, and close to its wheels sat sheep-dogs, fastened to them by chains. On the left, peasant cottages were visible; on the right lay a lumber-yard, two town shops, and a bakery. Farther away, alongside the governmental dram-shop, stood a dense cluster of young girls and peasant men, from which shouts rang out.
“The people are making holiday,” remarked Menshoff thoughtfully.
“What’s the cause of their joy?” inquired Kuzma.
“They are hoping for—”
“For what?”
“Everybody knows for what. The house-sprite!”
And it was true. On that bare pasture-common, that overcast, chilly day, those squeals of delight and the sounds of two accordions played in perfect unison seemed pitiful, were swallowed in an atmosphere of commonplaceness, of boredom and age. The people were experiencing something new, were celebrating something, but did they believe in their festival? “Oh, hardly!” said Kuzma to himself, as he drove close and surveyed the white, pink, and green petticoats of the girls, the indifferent, coarsely painted faces, the orange-coloured, golden-hued, and crimson kerchiefs. The cart drove up to the crowd and halted. Menshoff stared boldly at the throng and broke into a grin. At that close range the sounds no longer seemed pitiful—the accordions eagerly played up to each other, and in harmony with them, amid the approving hubbub of the drunken men, quaint adages flew briskly about.
“Ho-o,” some one shouted, to an accompaniment of dull but lusty stamping of feet:
“Plough not, reap not,
But bring fritters to the maidens!”
And a peasant, short of stature, who was standing behind the crowd, suddenly began to flourish his arms. Everything about him was prosperous, clean, substantial—his bast-shoes, his leg-wrappers, his new trousers of heavy plaided home-made linen, and the pleated skirts of his undercoat, made of appallingly thick grey cloth and cut very short, with a bob-tailed effect. It is probable that he had never danced before in his life, but now he began, softly and skilfully, to stamp with his bast-shoes, to wave his arms, and to shout in a tenor voice: “Stand aside, let the merchant have a peep!” and, leaping into the circle, which parted before him, he began to kick his legs about wildly in front of a tall young fellow, who, tossing away his peaked cap, twisted his boots about in devilish fashion and, as he did so, flung aside his black jacket and danced on in his new cotton print shirt. The face of the young man was pale and perspiring and wore a concentrated, gloomy expression which made his piercing yells seem all the more violent and unexpected.
“Son! Dear one!” shrieked an old crone in a plaided wool skirt of South Russian fashion, stretching out her hands. “Stop, for Christ’s sake! Dear boy, stop it—you’ll kill yourself!”
And her dear son suddenly threw back his head, clenched his fists and his teeth, and, with fury in his countenance and his trampling, screeched through his teeth:
“Tztzytz, good woman, shut your mouth with that cuckoo song.”
“And she has just sold the last bit of her home-made linen for him,” remarked Menshoff, as they crawled slowly across the pasture land. “She loves him passionately. She’s a widow. He raps her over the mouth when he is drunk. Of course, she deserves it.”
“What do you mean by that—‘she deserves it.’?” inquired Kuzma.
“Because she does. You shouldn’t be too indulgent—”
Yes, in the town, in the railway carriages, in the hamlets, in the villages, everywhere, one could feel the presence of something unusual, the echoes of some great festival, some great victory, great expectations. But back there in the suburb Kuzma had already realized that the farther one went into those limitless fields, beneath that cold, gloomy sky, the duller, the more irrational, the more melancholy would those echoes become. Now they had driven away, and the shouts in the crowd about the dram-shop had again become pitiful. There they were keeping festival and trying to “celebrate,” but ahead lay boredom, remote wilds, an empty street, smoky chimneyless hovels, water-casks with putrid pond water, and then more fields, the blue mist of the chilly distance, the dark forest on the horizon, low-hanging storm-clouds.
At one cottage—it had a broken window and a wheel on the rotten roof—a long-legged, ailing peasant sat on a bench. People look handsomer in their coffins than he looked in life. He resembled the poet Nekrasoff. Over his shoulders, above a long and soiled shirt of hemp crash, was thrown an old short sheepskin coat; his stick-like legs stood in felt boots; his huge dead-looking hands lay evenly spaced on his sharp knees, upon his ragged trousers. His cap was pulled far down on his forehead, after the fashion of old men; his eyes were suffering, entreating; his superhumanly meagre and emaciated face was drawn down, his ashen lips half open.
“That’s Tchutchen,”[29] said Menshoff, nodding in the direction of the sick man. “He’s been dying these two years from trouble with his stomach.”
“Tchutchen? What’s that—a nickname?”
“Yes, a nickname.”
“Stupid!” said Kuzma. And he turned his head away, in order to avoid seeing the horrid little girl by the neighbouring cottage. She was leaning back and holding in her arms an infant in a cap, and, as she stared intently at the passers-by and stuck out her tongue at them, she chewed on a bit of black bread, which she was preparing as a sucking-piece for the child. And in the last yard and threshing-floor the bushes hummed in the breezes, and a scarecrow, all awry, fluttered its empty sleeves. The threshing-floor, which adjoins the steppe, is always uncomfortable, dreary; and there were the scarecrow, the autumnal storm-clouds, the wind humming across the fields, ruffling up the tails of the fowls which roved about the threshing-floor, overgrown with pigweed and mugwort, alongside the grain-rick with its uncovered crest, alongside the threshing machine of Ryazan make, painted blue....