FAMILY ACCOUNTS SETTLED
CHAPTER I
It had never occurred to Arina Petrovna that there might come a time when she would become "one mouth too many." Now that moment had stolen upon her just when for the first time in her life her physical and moral strength was undermined. Such moments always arrive suddenly. Though one may long have been on the verge of breaking down, one may still hold out and stave off the end, till suddenly the last blow strikes from a quarter least expected. To be aware of its approach and dodge it, is difficult. One has to resign oneself without complaint, for it is the very blow that in an instant shatters one who till recently has been hale and healthy.
When Arina Petrovna took up her abode in Dubrovino, after having broken with Yudushka, she had labored under great difficulties. But then, at least, she had known that Pavel Vladimirych, though looking askance at her intrusion, was still a well-to-do man to whom another morsel meant little. Now things were very different. She stood at the head of a household that counted every crumb. And she knew the value of crumbs, having spent all her life in the country in constant intercourse with peasants and having assimilated the peasant's notions of the harm a "superfluous mouth" does to a house in which stores are already scanty.
Nevertheless, in the first days after the removal to Pogorelka, she still maintained her usual attitude, busied herself with putting things in shape in the new place, and exercised her former clarity of judgment in household management. But the affairs of the estate were troublesome and petty, and demanded her constant personal supervision; and though on first thought she did not see much sense in keeping accurate accounts in a place where farthings are put together to make up kopek pieces and these in turn to make ten-kopek pieces, she was soon forced to admit that she had been wrong in this. To be sure, there really was no sense in keeping careful accounts; but the point was, she no longer possessed her former industry and strength. Then, too, it was autumn, the busiest time of reckoning up accounts and taking inventories, and the incessant bad weather imposed inevitable limits to Arina Petrovna's energy. Ailments of old age came upon her and prevented her from leaving the house. The long dreary fall evenings set in and doomed her to enforced idleness. The old woman was all upset and exerted herself to the utmost, but succeeded in accomplishing nothing.
Another thing. She could not help noticing that something queer was coming over the orphans. They suddenly became dull and dispirited and were agitated by some vague plans for the future, plans in which notions of work were interspersed with notions of pleasures of the most innocent kind, of course—reminiscences of the boarding-school where they had been brought up, mingled with stray notions about men of toil, which they retained from their fragmentary reading, and timid hopes of clutching at some thread through their boarding-school connections, and so entering the bright kingdom of human life. One tormenting hope stood out definitely from the other vague longings, to leave hateful Pogorelka at whatever costs.
And at length one fine day Anninka and Lubinka actually announced to grandma that they simply could not stay at Pogorelka a moment longer; they led a beastly life there, met nobody but the priest, and he, when he met them, felt it incumbent upon him to tell of the virgins who had extinguished their lamps. It wasn't right, it wasn't fair.
The girls spoke sharply, afraid of their grandmother and simulating courage in order to overcome the anger and resistance they expected. But to their surprise Arina Petrovna listened without anger, without even a disposition toward the useless sermonizing that impotent old age is so given to.
Alas, she was no longer that dominating woman who used to say so confidently: "I am going to Khotkov and will take the little orphans with me." The change was due, not to senile impotence alone, but also to an acquired sense of something better and truer. The last buffets of fortune had not only tamed Arina Petrovna; they had also lighted up some corners of her mental horizon into which her thoughts evidently had never before entered. Now, she knew, there were certain forces in the human being that can remain dormant a long while, but once awakened, they carry one irresistibly on to the glimmering ray of life, that cheering ray for whose appearance one's eyes have been yearning so long amidst the hopeless darkness of the present. Once realizing the legitimacy of such a striving, she was powerless to oppose it. It is true, she tried to dissuade her granddaughters from their purpose, but feebly, without conviction. She was uneasy about the future in store for them; all the more so since she herself had no connections in so-called "society." Yet she felt that the parting with the girls was a proper and inevitable thing. What would become of them? frequently pressed on her mind; but she was now fully aware that neither this question nor others more terrible would restrain one who was struggling for release from captivity.