Forty Stories (25 page)

One evening in June when the sun was setting and the air smelled of hay and warm manure and steaming milk, a plain cart came driving into Dyudya’s courtyard with three people sitting in it. One was a man of about thirty who wore a canvas
suit, and sitting beside him was a boy of seven or eight in a long black coat with big bone buttons, and there was a young fellow in a red shirt sitting on the driver’s seat.

This young fellow unhitched the horses and walked them up and down the street, while the man washed himself, said a prayer with his face turned toward the church, and spreading out a fur cloak on the ground, sat down and had supper with the boy. He ate slowly, steadily, and Dyudya, who had known many travelers in his day, observed from his manners that he was a serious man with a head for business who knew his own worth.

Dyudya was sitting on the steps in his waistcoat, without a cap, waiting for a word from the stranger. He liked to listen in the evenings to travelers telling all kinds of stories as a preparation for sleep, and this had been his custom for some time. His old wife, Afanasyevna, and his daughter-in-law Sophia were milking in the cowshed, while Varvara, the other daughter-in-law, sat upstairs by an open window, eating sunflower seeds.

“I reckon that little fellow must be your son,” Dyudya asked the stranger.

“Well, no. Adopted. An orphan. I took him up for the salvation of my soul.”

They got to talking. The stranger seemed to be a talkative man with a gift for speech, and Dyudya learned that he belonged to the lower middle class, came from the town, owned his own house, and went by the name of Matvey Savvich. He was on his way to inspect some gardens he was renting from some German colonists. The name of the boy was Kuzka. The evening was hot and close, and no one wanted to sleep. When it grew dark and the pale stars were twinkling in the sky, Matvey Savvich began to tell the story of how he had taken up with Kuzka. Afanasyevna and Sophia stood a little way off, listening. Kuzka was away by the gate.

“It’s a complicated story, grandfather—extraordinarily so,” Matvey began. “If I told you everything that happened, it would
take all night. Ten years ago in our street, in a little house next to mine, where there’s now a candle factory and a creamery, there used to live an old widow, Marfa Semyonovna Kapluntsev, with her two sons. One was a conductor on the railroad, and the other, Vasya, was a boy of my own age, and he lived at home with his mother. The widow’s husband had kept horses, five pairs of them, and he used to send his drivers all over town. The widow continued the business, and she was just as good at managing the drivers as her husband, and so there were days when they made a clear five-ruble profit. The young fellow, too, was making a bit of money. He bred prize pigeons and sold them to the fanciers. I remember him standing on the roof, throwing up a broom and whistling, and the pigeons were high in the sky, but not high enough for him—he wanted them to go higher. Greenfinches and starlings, too, he caught, and he knew how to make good cages.… All pretty trifling maybe, but a man can make ten rubles a month from trifles like that. Well, time went on, the old woman lost the use of her legs and took to her bed. Consequently the house had no woman to look after it, and that’s about as good as being blind in both eyes! So the old lady bestirred herself and made up her mind to get Vasya married. They called in a matchmaker at once, and then the old women got to talking and our Vasya went off to look at the girls. He picked on Mashenka, the widow Samokhvalikha’s daughter. They didn’t waste any time: they decided to get married on the spot, and in a week all arrangements were made. She was quite young, just seventeen, very thin, knee-high to a grasshopper, with a pale pretty-looking face, and all the qualities of a young lady, and the dowry was good, too, amounting to five hundred rubles, a cow, and a bed.… But the old lady knew what was in store, and on the third day after the wedding she departed unto the heavenly Jerusalem where there is neither sickness nor sighing. The young ones had masses said for her soul, and they began to live. Things went splendidly for six months, and then suddenly another misfortune occurred. It
never rains but it pours. Vasya was summoned to draw lots as a conscript. Poor fellow, they made a soldier out of him, and they gave him no exemptions. They shaved his head and packed him off to the kingdom of Poland. It was God’s will, there was nothing to be done about it. When he said good-by to his wife in the courtyard he was all right until he looked up at the pigeons in the hayloft for the last time, and then he cried as if his heart would break. It was pitiful to see him. At first Mashenka got her mother to stay with her so that she wouldn’t be bored by being alone; the mother stayed until the birth of the baby, who is this very Kuzka, and then went off to stay with another married daughter in Oboyan, and Mashenka was alone with her child. There were the five drivers—drunken and mischievous peasants, all of them—and then there were the horses and carts, and fences would get broken or the soot would catch fire in the chimney—things a woman couldn’t cope with—and being as how we were neighbors she would come to me for every least thing. So I would go over and put things right and give her advice. Naturally I’d go indoors and have a cup of tea and we’d fall to talking. I was a young fellow then, quite clever, and I was fond of talking on all manner of subjects, and she was refined and well-mannered. She dressed neatly—in summer she went about with a sunshade. I remember how I would start on theology or politics, and she would be flattered, and she would give me tea and jam.… In a word, not to make a long story out of it, I’m telling you, grandfather, a year had not passed before I was troubled with the Evil Spirit, the enemy of all mankind. I began by noticing I was getting bored and irritable on the days when I didn’t see her. All the time I was trying to think up excuses for going to see her. ‘It’s high time,’ I’d say, ‘to put in the double windows for winter,’ and I’d idle away a whole day putting in the windows for her and taking care to leave a couple for the next day. ‘I’d better count Vasya’s pigeons and see that none of them has got lost’—things like that. I was always talking to her across the fence, and in the end I made a little
gate in it to avoid going all the way round. From women much evil and every abomination have come into the world. Not only we sinners, but even holy men have been seduced. Mashenka did not keep me at arm’s length. Instead of thinking of her husband and taking care of herself, she fell in love with me. I began to notice how she was bored without me, and she was always walking along the fence and looking through the chinks into my yard. My head was going round in a kind of frenzy. On Thursday in Easter Week I got up early before there was any light in the sky, and when I went to market I passed close to her gate, and the Evil One was waiting for me. I watched her, looking through the trellis at the top of the gate, and she was standing there in the middle of her courtyard, already awake and feeding her ducks. I lost control over myself and called to her. She came and looked at me through the trellis. Her little face was pale, her eyes soft and sleepy-looking.… I loved her so much, and I began paying her compliments as though we were not standing at the gate, but visiting on name days, while she blushed and laughed and looked me straight in the eyes, not blinking. I lost my senses. I began to tell her about my real feelings for her. She opened the gate, let me in, and from that morning we began to live as man and wife.”

At that moment the hunchback Alyoshka came into the yard from the street, and without paying any attention to them he ran breathlessly into the house. Soon he came running out with a concertina, and jingling some coins in his pocket and chewing sunflower seeds, he ran off and disappeared behind the gate.

“Who’s that fellow?” Matvey Savvich asked.

“My son Alexey,” Dyudya replied. “He’s gone off to have some fun, the scoundrel! God has afflicted him with a hunchback, so we don’t ask too much of him!”

“He’s always out with the boys, always having fun,” Afanasyevna sighed. “Before Shrovetide we married him off and thought he’d improve, but, well—he’s worse than ever now!”

“There’s nothing we can do,” Dyudya said. “All it comes to
is that we are keeping another man’s daughter for nothing.”

From somewhere behind the church there came the sound of glorious mournful singing. The words were indistinguishable, but the voices of two tenors and a bass could be made out. Everyone was listening, and there was complete silence in the yard. Suddenly two of the singers broke off with a roar of laughter, while the third, the tenor, continued to sing in a voice so high that everyone instinctively looked up as though the voice had reached the very heights of heaven. Varvara came out of the house, shading her eyes with her hand as though blinded by the sun, and she looked toward the church.

“It’s the priest’s sons and the schoolmaster,” she said.

Once again all three voices sang together.

Matvey Savvich sighed and went on: “Well, grandfather, that’s how it was. Two years later we got a letter from Vasya in Warsaw. He wrote that the authorities were invaliding him home. He was ill. By that time I had put all foolishness out of my head, and I had a fine match arranged for me, but I didn’t know how to get rid of my sweetheart. Every day I made up my mind to speak to Mashenka, but I didn’t know how to approach her without her screaming her head off. The letter freed my hands. We read it together, and then she turned white as snow, and I said: ‘Thank God, now you will be an honest woman again,’ and then she said: ‘I’m not going to live with him!’ ‘Well, he’s your husband, isn’t he?’ I said. ‘Is it an easy thing?’ she went on. ‘I never loved him, and married him against my will. My mother made me do it.’ ‘Don’t try to get out of it, you little fool,’ I said. ‘Tell me this: were you married to him in church, or not?’ ‘I was married to him,’ she answered, ‘but I love you and want to live with you till I die. Let people laugh! I don’t care!…’ ‘You’re a God-fearing woman,’ I said, ‘and you have read the holy books. What does it say there?’ ”

“Once married, she must cleave unto her husband.” Dyudya said.

“Husband and wife are one flesh,” Matvey Savvich went on.
“ ‘We have sinned, you and I,’ I said, ‘and we must listen to our consciences and fear God. We must ask forgiveness of Vasya—he’s a quiet soft sort of fellow, and he won’t kill you! And it’s better,’ I said, ‘to suffer tortures in this world at the hands of a lawful husband than to gnash your teeth on Judgment Day!’ But the silly woman would not listen to me, and she kept on with her ‘I love you,’ and that was all she could do. Vasya came back on the Saturday before Trinity early in the morning. I saw everything from my fence. He ran into the house and a moment later emerged with Kuzka in his arms, laughing and crying at the same time, kissing Kuzka while looking up at the hayloft—he wanted to go to his pigeons, but he had no heart to put the boy down. He was a timid fellow, sentimental too. The day passed happily, quiet and decent. They were ringing the bells for the evening service when the thought came to me: ‘Tomorrow is Trinity Sunday, and why haven’t they decorated the gate and the fences with green boughs? Something must be wrong,’ I thought. So I went over to their house. I looked in, and there he was sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, his eyes staring as though he were drunk, tears streaming down his cheeks and his hands shaking. He was pulling cracknels, necklaces, gingerbread, and all kinds of sweetmeats out of his bundle and hurling them on the floor. Three-year-old Kuzka was crawling about and chewing gingerbread, while Mashenka stood by the stove, pale and trembling, muttering to herself: ‘I’m not your wife, I don’t want to live with you!’ and more nonsense like that. I bowed down at Vasya’s feet and said: ‘We have sinned grievously against you, Vasily Maximich—forgive us for Christ’s sake!’ Then I got up and said these words to Mashenka: ‘It is your solemn duty, Maria Semyonovna, to wash Vasily’s feet and drink the dirty water. Be an obedient wife to him, and pray to God’s mercy that my transgressions may be forgiven unto me.’ All this came to me as though inspired by an angel from heaven, and then I gave her some wise counsels, speaking with such feeling that tears came to my eyes. And two
days later Vasya comes up to me. ‘Matvey, I forgive you, you and my wife,’ he says. God be with you! She is a soldier’s wife, all alone, and it was hard for her to take care of herself. She isn’t the first and she won’t be the last. Only,’ he went on, ‘I beseech you to live in the future as though there never had been anything between you, and not to show any signs of affection for her, while I’ll do everything in my power to please her so that she’ll love me again.’ He shook my hand, drank some tea, and went off happily. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘God be praised,’ and I was happy because everything had gone off so well. But no sooner had Vasya gone out of the yard than Mashenka came in. What sufferings I had to undergo! She hung on my neck, wept, and prayed. ‘For God’s sake, don’t leave me,’ she said. ‘I can’t go on living without you!’ ”

“Shameful hussy!” Dyudya sighed.

“So I swore at her and stamped my feet and took her into the hallway and latched the door and shouted at her: ‘Go back to your husband! Don’t shame me in front of people! Put the fear of God in your heart!’ And every day there were scenes like that. One morning I was standing in the yard near the stable and mending a bridle. Suddenly I looked up and saw her running through the little gate into my yard, barefoot, wearing only a petticoat, coming straight toward me. She took hold of the bridle and got smeared with rosin. She was trembling and weeping. ‘I can’t live with that brute! I can’t bear it! If you don’t love me, kill me!’ I lost patience and struck out at her with the bridle, and at that moment Vasya ran in through the gate shouting despairingly: ‘Don’t you hit her! Don’t you hit her!’ He went right up to her, and he was waving his arms and behaving like a madman, and then he began to beat her with his fists with all his strength, and then he threw her to the ground and stomped her. I tried to protect her, but he took the reins and gave her a thrashing, and all the time he was making little whinnying sounds like a colt:
hee-hee-hee
!”