“Shame on you, brother Tikhon Ilitch,” he blurted out, turning away to the window. “And especially after what you told me yourself—”
“But then why did she blush?” inquired Tikhon Ilitch maliciously, with a perturbed and awkward smile.
VIII
THE most unpleasant thing in the morning was—washing oneself. A frosty atmosphere was brought into the ante-room with the straw; ice that was like broken glass floated in the wash-basin. Kuzma sometimes began to drink his tea after having washed only his hands and, thus fresh from his slumbers, appeared truly an old man. Thanks to lack of cleanliness and the cold, he had grown extremely thin and grey since the autumn. His hands had grown thinner, and the skin on them had become more delicate, shiny, and covered with certain tiny purplish spots.
“The old grey horse has gone down a steep hill,” he said to himself.
It was a grey morning. Beneath the crusted grey snow the village also had become quite grey in hue by St. Philip’s Day. The frozen household linen hung like grey boards from the rafters under the roofs of the sheds. Everything round about the cottages was frozen—they poured out the slops and threw out the ashes. Tattered little urchins hurried through the streets between the cottages and sheds to school, ran up the snowdrifts and slid down them on their bark slippers; all of them had heavy crash bags containing slates and bread. From the opposite direction came aged, ailing dark-faced Tohugunok,[34] with not a trace of his former agility remaining, clad in his thin little overcoat, and bowed beneath the weight of his yoke, from which hung two buckets; stumbling along in his hideous felt boots, which had turned stiff as oaken boards, and were bound with pigskin. From drift to drift a horse dragged the water-cask, plugged with straw, rocking and splashing as it went; and behind it ran white-eyed Kobylyai—the stammerer. Women passed, on their way to borrow from one another salt, millet, a scoop of flour for griddlecakes, or a hasty pudding. The threshing-floors were deserted. Only at Yakoff’s place was smoke issuing from the gate of the kiln: in imitation of the rich peasants, he threshed during the winter. And beyond the threshing-floors, beyond the bare bushes in the back yards, beneath a low-hanging whitish sky, stretched the grey snow-covered plain, a waste of snow-crust frozen in the semblance of waves. It was in truth more cosy in the village, but the place seemed infected with the plague: almost every household had a case of smallpox or spotted typhus.
Occasionally Kuzma went to eat luncheon with Koshel in the servants’ quarters—potatoes as hot as fire itself, or the remains of the sour cabbage soup left over from the previous day. He recalled the town where he had lived all his life, and was amazed to find that he had no longing whatsoever to go back there. The town was Tikhon’s cherished dream; he scorned and hated the country with all his soul. Kuzma only tried to hate it. He now reviewed his existence with more terror than ever. He had grown thoroughly wild and unsociable in Durnovka; he did nothing, was bored, was distressed by his own idleness; frequently he omitted to wash himself; he did not take off his undercoat; he ate greedily out of one bowl with Koshel. But the worst of it all was that, while alarmed at his mode of existence, which was aging him not merely from day to day but actually from hour to hour, he was conscious that it was nevertheless agreeable to him; that he seemed to have got back into precisely that rut which, possibly, had rightly belonged to him from the day of his birth. Not for nothing, apparently, did the Durnovka blood flow in his veins! Nevertheless, that interminable Durnovka winter oppressed him to the point of pain—those cottages, the holes in the ice of the pond, the horrid little boys, the dogs on the roofs, the cold, the dirt, the sickness, the animal-like laziness of the peasant men. Nearly every day he called to mind Menshoff, Akim, Syery....
After luncheon he sometimes took a stroll over the manor-farm or in the village. He went also to Yakoff’s threshing-floor, or dropped in at the cottage of Syery or that of Koshel, whose old woman lived alone, was reputed to be a witch, was tall and frightfully emaciated, and had teeth as intrusively conspicuous as those of a skull. She spoke roughly and decisively, like a man, and smoked a pipe: she would make a fire in the stove, seat herself on the sleeping-board, and set to smoking, all by herself, swinging back and forth as she did so her long, thin leg in its heavy black bark shoe. During the entire Fast Kuzma went away from the farm only twice—once to the post-office, and once to see his brother. And those little trips were pleasant, but painful; Kuzma got so thoroughly chilled that he could not feel whether he had any feet or not. At the beginning of the autumn he had still possessed a firm glance, a tidy appearance. But the firmness of the glance had vanished, and his clothing had grown dilapidated. The collar of his shirt was reduced to a fringe, and the elbows of his coat wore through; his calfskin boots had become fairly red with rust, thin, and, in places, gaping. His sheepskin coat had served him so long that it was dotted all over with bald spots. And the wind on the plain was savage. After sitting in the house so long at Durnovka he was not able to endure the strong, fresh winter air. After prolonged inspection of the village the snowy grey expanse came as a surprise; the far distance, enveloped in blue tints of winter, seemed as a picture so beautiful that one could never gaze one’s fill. The horse dashed along smartly in the face of the harsh wind, snorting as he went; frozen lumps of snow flew from beneath his shod hoofs against the dashboard of the sledge. Koshel, with a blackish-purple frost-bitten cheek, briskly clearing his throat, sprang from the box at the slopes and leaped back into the sledge sidewise, on the run. But the wind pierced straight through him; his feet, tucked into straw that was all mixed with snow, ached and stiffened; his forehead and cheek-bones were racked with rheumatic pains. And it was so boresome in the low-ceiled post-office at Ulianovka—boresome as it can be only in official offices in the wilds. There was an odour of mildew, of sealing-wax. The ragged postman was pounding with his stamp. Grumpy Sakharoff, who resembled a gorilla, was roaring at the peasants, raging because it had not occurred to Kuzma to send him half a dozen fowls or, at least, a pud of flour; and he inquired: “What’s your name, and your family name?”—and, after rummaging in the closet, he announced with decision: “Nothing for you.” In the vicinity of Tikhon Ilitch’s house Kuzma was upset by the stench of manure fumes, which reminded him that in the world exist towns, people, newspapers, news. It was agreeable, also, to chat with his brother, to rest at his house and get warm.
But the chat never was a success. His brother was called off every minute to the shop, or about some detail of domestic management, and, besides, he could talk of nothing but his property matters, the lies, craftiness, and malice of the peasants—about the sheer necessity of getting rid of the estate as speedily as possible. Nastasya Petrovna was pitiable. Evidently she had come to fear her husband most terribly; she burst into the conversation at unseasonable moments, at equally unseasonable moments she praised him—his intelligence, his keen managerial eye, the fact that he entered into everything, every minute detail of the business, himself.
“And he’s so accessible to every one, so approachable!” she said—and Tikhon Ilitch roughly cut her short, while Kuzma did not know what to say, fearing to get mixed up in a quarrel. They had exchanged roles: now it was not he who suggested alarm, but his brother who frightened and exhorted him; it was not he but his brother who demonstrated that it was impossible to live in Russia. After an hour of that sort of conversation, Kuzma began to long to get home, to get back to the manor. “What is to become of me?” he thought in alarm, as he listened to his brother discussing the sale of the estate. And was it possible that that dreadful marriage between Deniska and the Bride would come off? And why did Tikhon so obstinately insist that the marriage must take place? “He has gone mad, he certainly has gone mad!” muttered Kuzma on his way home, as he called to mind Tikhon’s surly and malevolent face, his uncommunicativeness, his suspiciousness, and his wearisome repetition of one and the same thing over and over. He began to shout at Koshel, at the horse, feeling in a hurry to hide in his little house his sadness, his old, cold clothing, his loneliness, and his tenderness at the thought of the Bride’s sweet, sorrowful face, her womanliness and—her taciturnity. “Ekh, and how could she fail to go to ruin here!” he said sadly to himself, as he gazed through the twilight gloom at the meagre lights in Durnovka.