Forty Stories (37 page)

“It is beyond all understanding,” she thought, “why God gives beauty and charm and gentle, melancholy eyes to weak, unhappy, useless mortals—why are they so charming?”

“I’ll be turning off to the right here,” Khanov said, jumping into his carriage. “Good-by, and a pleasant journey to you!”

And now once again she thought of her pupils, of the examination, of the janitor and the school board; and when the wind blowing from the right brought her the rumbling of the departing carriage, these thoughts were mingled with others. She wanted to dream of his beautiful eyes, of love, of the happiness that would never come to her.

And if she became his wife! It was cold in the morning, there was no one to heat the stove, the janitor was away somewhere, and the school children came in as soon as it was light, making a good deal of noise, bringing in mud and snow. Everything was so bleak and uncomfortable. Her quarters consisted of one little room and a kitchen. Every day after school hours she had a
headache, and after dinner a burning sensation over her heart. She had to collect money from the children for firewood and for the janitor, and this money had to be turned over to the trustee, and then she had to implore this man—this insolent, overstuffed peasant—for God’s sake to send her some of the firewood. At night she dreamed of examinations, peasants, snowdrifts. This life had aged and coarsened her, making her ugly, awkward, and gaunt, so that she looked as though lead had been poured into her veins. She was afraid of everything, and always stood up in the presence of the trustee or a member of the zemstvo council, and when she had cause to mention any of them she always referred to them deferentially, never using their names; it was always “they said this, they did that.” No one found her attractive, and life continued to be boring, with no show of affection, no friendly sharing of interests, no interesting acquaintances. In her situation, how terrible it would be if she fell in love!

“Sit tight, Vasilyevna!”

Once again there was another steep climb.

She had become a schoolteacher out of necessity, without any vocation for it. She had in fact never thought of a vocation, or of the usefulness of education: the most important part of her work, she thought, lay not in the children or in enlightening their minds, but in examinations. And when, pray, did she ever have time to think of a vocation or of the advantages of education? Schoolteachers and ill-paid doctors and their assistants, for all their arduous work, never have even the consolation of thinking they are serving the people or an idea—they are thinking about the next crust of bread, about firewood, about bad roads, about illnesses. Their lives are hard and uninteresting, and only plodding silent cart horses like Maria Vasilyevna can bear such servitude for long. Lively, sensitive, impressionable people who talk of a vocation and service to an idea soon grow weary and throw up the task.

To find the driest and shortest road Semyon sometimes struck
out across a meadow or behind cottages, but the peasants would not always let him pass: if he came to priests’ land, there would be no free passage, and it was the same when he came to a plot of land which Ivan Ionov had bought from a landowner and surrounded with a ditch. In each case they had to turn back.

They reached Nizhneye Gorodishche. Near the tavern horse-carts loaded with great bottles of sulfuric acid stood about the dung-strewn earth, still covered with snow. There were a great many people in the tavern, all of them drivers, and the place smelled of vodka, tobacco, and sheepskins. The roar of conversation was sometimes interrupted by the banging of a swing door. The sound of an accordion came through the partition wall, an endless sound. Maria Vasilyevna sat down and drank her tea, while the peasants at the next table swilled down vodka and beer, perspiring freely from the tea they had already drunk and the suffocating heat of the tavern.

Voices kept shouting confusedly: “Did you hear that, Kuzma?” “What’s up, eh?” “Lord save us!” “Ivan Dementyich, I’ll get you!” “Look there, brother!”

A very small pock-marked peasant with a black beard, quite drunk, was suddenly surprised by something or other, and exploded into a torrent of foul language.

“What do you mean by all that dirty language, eh?” Semyon shouted angrily. He was sitting at the far end of the room. “Can’t you see there’s a young lady present?”

“What’s that, a young lady, eh?” someone jeered from another corner.

“What a swine!”

“I didn’t mean any harm,” the very small peasant said confusedly. “Excuse me. I lays down my money, and the young lady lays hers. Good morning, ma’am.”

“Good morning,” replied the schoolteacher.

“Very well, thank you kindly.”

Maria Vasilyevna enjoyed her tea, and soon her face was as
red as the others, and once more she fell to thinking about the janitor, about firewood.…

She heard a voice from the next table: “Just look over there, brother. That’s the schoolmistress from Vyazovye. I recognize her. She’s a fine young lady.…”

“She’s all right.”

The swing door was continually banging, and people were continually coming in and going out. Maria Vasilyevna sat there absorbed in her thoughts, but the accordion on the other side of the wall kept playing and playing. Patches of sunlight which had lain on the floor when she came in moved up to the counter, then up the wall, and then vanished altogether: it meant it was now afternoon. The peasants at the next table were getting ready to go. The very small peasant went up to Maria Vasilyevna, swaying slightly. He thrust out his hand; and seeing him, all the other peasants came up to her and shook hands and went out one by one. The door banged and whined nine times.

“Vasilyevna, get ready!” Semyon called to her.

They drove away, and again the horse went at a walking pace.

“A while back they were building a school here in their Nizhneye Gorodishche,” said Semyon, turning round. “And they did something wicked.”

“What did they do?”

“The chairman put a thousand in his pocket, and the trustee put a thousand, and the teacher put five hundred.”

“You shouldn’t slander people, grandfather. The whole school only cost a thousand. It’s all nonsense what you say!”

“I wouldn’t know.… I’m only telling you what they tell me.”

It was quite clear that Semyon did not believe the schoolmistress. The peasants, too, did not believe her. They always thought her salary was too large, twenty-one rubles a month-five rubles, in their estimation, would have been sufficient—and they thought she kept the greater part of the money she received
for firewood and for the janitor. The trustee thought like the rest, though he made a profit out of the firewood and received a salary from the peasants for acting as trustee, and all this in secret without the knowledge of the authorities.

But now, thank God, they had left the forest behind them, and it was level ground all the way to Vyazovye. They had only a little further to go—a river to cross, then a railroad track, and then they would be in Vyazovye.

“Where are you going now?” Maria Vasilyevna asked Semyon. “Why don’t you take the road to the right across the bridge?”

“What’s wrong with this road? The water’s not very deep.”

“Be careful you don’t drown the horse!”

“What’s that?”

“Why, there’s Khanov driving over the bridge,” Maria Vasilyevna said, seeing the carriage and four horses far to the right. “It is him, isn’t it?”

“It’s him for sure. Reckon he didn’t find Bakvist at home after all. God in heaven, he’s a fool to drive all that way, when it’s all of two miles nearer this way.”

They came to the river. In summer the river was only a shallow stream which you could walk across easily. Usually in August it was dried up, but now, after the spring floods, it had grown to be a torrent of swift, cold, muddy water fifty feet wide. There were fresh wheel tracks visible on the bank up to the water’s edge: evidently carts had been going over.

“Giddap!” Semyon shouted angrily and anxiously, tugging violently at the reins and flapping his arms like a pair of wings. “Giddap!”

The horse waded into the water up to his belly, stopped, and then plunged on again, straining to the utmost, and Maria Vasilyevna felt the shock of cold water lapping her feet.

“Get up!” she shouted, rising to her feet. “Get up!”

They came to the opposite bank.

“What a business, eh? Good Lord!” muttered Semyon, setting
the harness straight. “Those zemstvo people plague the devil out of us!”

Her shoes and galoshes were full of water; the hem of her skirt and her coat and one sleeve were drenched and dripping. The bags of sugar and flour she had bought were soaked, and this was harder to bear than all the rest. In her despair Maria Vasilyevna only clasped her hands together and murmured: “Oh, Semyon, Semyon, how could you … really?”

The barrier was down at the railroad crossing: an express train was leaving the station. Maria Vasilyevna stood at the crossing waiting for the train to pass, her whole body trembling with cold. From where they were, they could see Vyazovye, the green roof over the school and the church with the blazing crosses reflecting the rays of the setting sun; and the station windows were also ablaze, and rose-colored smoke came from the engine.… And it seemed to her that everything in the world was shivering with cold.

At last the train appeared, the windows aflame like the crosses on the church: it made her eyes ache to look at them. Maria Vasilyevna caught a quick glimpse of a lady standing on the platform of a first-class carriage. It was her mother! There was an extraordinary resemblance. The same glorious hair, the same forehead, the same inclination of the head. With amazing clarity, for the first time in thirty years, there came to her vivid images of her mother, her father, her brother, their apartment in Moscow, the aquarium with the little fishes, everything to the smallest detail. There came to her the sound of someone playing on the grand piano, and the voice of her father, and she saw herself young and pretty and well dressed in a warm and brilliantly lit room, with her whole family around her. A great joy and happiness welled up in her heart, and she pressed her hands to her temples in rapture, crying softly and imploringly: “Mother!”

And she began to cry, for no reason. At that moment Khanov drove up with his four-in-hand, and seeing him, she imagined
such happiness as had never been, and she smiled and nodded to him as though they possessed equal stations in life and were intimate with one another, and it seemed to her that the whole sky, the trees, and all the windows were glowing with her happiness and her triumph. No! Her father and mother had never died, and she herself had never been a schoolteacher: there had been a long, strange, tortured dream, but now she was wide awake.

“Vasilyevna, get up in the cart!”

Suddenly it all vanished. The barrier slowly rose. Trembling, numb with cold, Maria Vasilyevna took her place in the cart. The carriage with the four horses crossed the railroad track, and Semyon followed it. The guard at the crossing lifted his cap.

“Here is Vyazovye! We have arrived!”

1897

AT breakfast the next day they served very tasty
pirozhki
, crayfish, and mutton cutlets, and while we were eating, Nicanor the cook came in to ask what the guests would like for dinner. He was a man of middle height with a puffy face and small eyes, and though clean-shaven he somehow looked as though his mustache had been plucked rather than shaved.

Alyokhin told us that the beautiful Pelageya was in love with Nicanor. As he was a drunkard with a violent temper, she did not want him for a husband, but was prepared to live with him. He was a very devout man, and his religious convictions did not permit him to live in this way, and so he insisted upon marriage and refused any other solution, and when he was drunk he used to curse her and even beat her. Sometimes she would hide upstairs and fall into fits of weeping, and on such occasions Alyokhin and the servants remained in the house to defend her if it should become necessary.

They started talking about love.

“How love is born,” Alyokhin was saying, “why Pelageya has not fallen in love with someone closer to her both inwardly and outwardly, why she fell in love with ‘Dog-face’ Nicanor—for we all call him ‘Dog-face’—and to what extent personal happiness counts in love—all these things are unknown and you can argue about them as much as you please. So far there has been only one incontestably true statement made on the subject of love, and that is the statement that love is the most wonderful thing in the
world: everything else which has been written or spoken on the subject of love is incomplete and inconclusive, nothing more than a list of unanswered questions. The explanation which seems to fit one case fails to fit a dozen others, and in my opinion the very best thing is to offer explanations in particular cases rather than generalizations. As the doctors say, each case should receive individual treatment.”

“Perfectly true,” Burkin assented.

“We educated Russians have a partiality for unanswered questions. We usually poeticize love, prettifying it with roses and nightingales, and so we Russians prettify our love affairs with these fatal questions, and usually we choose the least interesting questions. In Moscow when I was a student I had a girl, a charming creature, who was always thinking about the monthly allowance I would give her and the price of a pound of beef whenever I embraced her. So, too, when we are in love, we never weary of asking ourselves questions about whether it is honorable or dishonorable, sensible or stupid, and where this love affair will lead us, and things like that. I don’t know whether this is a good thing or not, but I do know these questions get in the way, and are irritating and unsatisfying.”

He had the appearance of a man who wants to tell a story. People who lead lonely lives always have something on their minds they are eager to talk about. Bachelors living in town visit bathhouses and restaurants for no other reason except to talk, and sometimes they tell exceedingly interesting stories to the waiters and bathhouse attendants; and in the country they will usually pour out their hearts to their guests. Through a window we could see a gray sky and trees drenched in rain. It was the kind of weather which makes it impossible to go anywhere, when the only thing to do is to tell stories and to listen to them. So Alyokhin began his story: