Forty Stories

The Peasant Women

IN the village of Raibuzh, just opposite the church, there is a two-story house with stone foundations and an iron roof. The owner of the house, Philip Ivanov Kamin, and his family live in the lower story. Kamin’s nickname is Dyudya. On the upper floor, where it is very hot in summer and very cold in winter, there are lodgings for officials, merchants, and country gentlemen passing through the town. Dyudya rents out some parcels of land, runs a tavern along the main road, trades in tar, honey, cattle, and magpies, and has amassed some eight thousand rubles, which he keeps in the town bank.

Fedor, his elder son, is a foreman mechanic in a factory, and as the peasants say, he has climbed so high that no one can follow after him. Fedor’s wife, Sophia, is a plain sickly woman who lives at home with her father-in-law, weeps continually, and every Sunday drives over to the hospital for treatment. The second son, Alyoshka, is a hunchback and lives at home with his father. He has only lately married Varvara, a girl from a poor family, young, pretty, healthy, fond of dressing up. When officials and merchants stay at the house, they always demand that Varvara bring in the samovar and make up their beds.

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!”

“I’d take the reins and give you a taste of them!” Varvara muttered, moving away. “Torturing one of us women, you damned brutes!”

“Shut up, you jade!” Dyudya shouted at her.

“Hee-hee-hee!” Matvey Savvich went on. “Then one of the drivers came running up from his yard, I called out for my workman, and between us we were able to rescue Mashenka and carry her home. What a disgrace it was! That same evening I went to see how she was. She was lying in bed, wrapped up in bandages and compresses, with only her eyes and nose visible, looking up at the ceiling. ‘Well, good evening, Maria Semyonovna,’ I said, and got no answer. Vasya was sitting in the next room, holding his head in his hands and blubbering. ‘What a brute I am!’ he was saying. ‘I’ve ruined my life! Dear God, let me die!’ I sat for half an hour with Mashenka, and gave her some sound advice. I tried to put the fear of God in her. ‘Those who behave righteously,’ I said, ‘go to Paradise, but as for you—you will go to a Gehenna of fire, like all adultresses! Don’t resist your husband! Go down on your knees before him!’ But she said nary a word and did not blink an eyelid, and I might just as well have talked to a post. The next day Vasya fell ill with something like cholera, and during the evening I heard he was dead. Then they buried him. Mashenka did not go to the funeral—she did not want to let people see her shameless face and her bruises. But soon they were saying all over the place that Vasya had not died a natural death, but Mashenka had done away with him. The police soon heard about it. They dug up Vasya, slit him open, and found arsenic in his stomach. It was quite obvious he had been poisoned, so the police came and they took Mashenka away and the sweet innocent babe Kuzka, too. They put her in jail. The stupid woman had gone too far—God was punishing her! Eight months later she went on trial. She sat, I remember, on a low stool, wearing a gray gown with a white kerchief round her head, thin, pale, sharp-eyed, pitiable. Beside her there was a soldier holding a gun. She wouldn’t confess her guilt. There were some in the court who said she had poisoned her husband, and there were others who argued he had poisoned himself from grief. I was one of the witnesses. When they questioned me, I told them the whole truth. ‘She’s guilty,’ I said. ‘It’s no use hiding it—she didn’t love her husband, and she was strong-willed.…’ The trial began in the morning, and the same evening she was sentenced to thirteen years’ penal servitude in Siberia. After the sentence Mashenka spent three months in the local jail. I used to go and see her, bringing her in simple humanity small gifts of tea and sugar. I remember how her whole body would start trembling as soon as she set eyes on me, and she would wring her hands and mutter: ‘Go away! Go away!’ She would clasp Kuzka to her, as though she were afraid I would take the boy away from her. ‘See,’ I would say, ‘what you have brought upon yourself! Ah, my poor dear ruined Mashenka, you wouldn’t listen to me when I was giving you advice, and so you must weep! Yes, you are guilty,’ I said, ‘and you have only yourself to blame!’ I was offering her sound advice, but she only kept on saying: ‘Go away! Go away!’ as she huddled against the wall with Kuzka in her arms, trembling all over. When they were taking her off to the provincial capital, I accompanied her to the railroad station and slipped a ruble into her bundle for my soul’s sake. She never reached Siberia. In the provincial capital she fell ill with a fever, and she died in the jail.”

“Live like a dog, die like a dog!” Dyudya said.

“Well, Kuzka was sent back home.… I thought it over and then decided I would bring him up. What else could I do? He was born of a jailbird, but he had a living, Christian soul. I was sorry for him. I’ll make a clerk out of him, and if I never have children of my own I’ll make a merchant of him. Wherever I go now I take him with me—let him learn to work!”

All the time that Matvey Savvich was talking, Kuzka was sitting on a stone by the gate, his face cupped in his hands, gazing up at the sky; and seen from a distance in the dark, he resembled a tree stump.

“Kuzka, go to bed!” Matvey Savvich yelled at him.

“Yes, it’s high time!” Dyudya said, getting up. He yawned noisily and then went on: “They think they’re clever, not listening to advice, and so they come to grief!”

The moon was now floating high over the courtyard, moving in one direction while the clouds moved in another, but soon the clouds drifted away and then the moon shone clear over the courtyard. Matvey Savvich said a prayer with his face turned toward the church, bade the others good night, and lay down on the ground near the cart. Kuzka also said a prayer, lay down in the cart, and covered himself with a short coat; and for comfort he dug a hole in the straw and curled up so that his elbows touched his knees. From the yard Dyudya could be seen lighting a candle in a downstairs room, and then he put on his spectacles and stood in a corner with a book. For a long time he continued to read and bow before the icon.

The travelers fell asleep. Afanasyevna and Sophia went up to the cart and gazed down at Kuzka.

“The poor orphan sleeps,” the old woman said. “He’s so thin and weak, nothing but bones! He has no mother and no one to look after him on the road.”

“My Grisha must be about two years older,” Sophia said. “Up there in the factory, without his mother, he lives like a slave. I dare say his master beats him. When I looked at this poor orphan just now, I thought of my own Grisha, and my heart’s blood turned to ice.”

There was silence between them for a few moments.

“I wonder whether he remembers his mother,” the old woman asked.

“How could he?”

From Sophia’s eyes large tears flowed.

“He’s all curled up like a kitten,” she said, sobbing and laughing with tenderness and sorrow. “Poor little orphan!”

Kuzka started and opened his eyes. He saw above him an ugly, wrinkled, tear-stained face, and beside it another face, old and toothless, with a sharp chin and a humped nose, and high above them the unfathomable sky and the rushing clouds and the moon; and he screamed in terror. Sophia also screamed, echoes answered their screams, the heavy air trembled, a watchman tapped with his stick, and a dog barked. Matvey Savvich muttered in his sleep and turned over on the other side.

Late at night when Dyudya and the old woman and the watchman were all asleep, Sophia came out to the gate and sat down on a bench. The heat was stifling, and her head ached from crying. The street was wide and long; it stretched for nearly two miles to the right, and two miles to the left, and there was no end to it. The moon no longer shone over the courtyard, but from behind the church. One side of the street was flooded with moonlight, the other lay in deep darkness; and the long shadows of the poplars and the starling cotes stretched across the whole street, while the black and menacing shadows of the church spread far and wide, embracing Dyudya’s gate and half his house. No one was about; only silence. From time to time there came faint strains of music from the end of the street. It was Alyoshka playing on his concertina.

Something moved in the shadows near the walls of the church: impossible to tell whether it was a man or a cow, or only a big bird rustling in the trees. And then a figure emerged out of the shadows, paused, said something in a man’s voice, and disappeared down the church lane. A moment later another figure emerged about six feet away from the church gate, and this figure went straight from the church to the gate, and when it saw Sophia sitting on the bench, it stood still.

“Is that you, Varvara?” Sophia said.

“What if it is?”

It was Varvara. She stood perfectly still for a few moments, and then she went to the bench and sat down.

“Where have you been?” Sophia asked.

Varvara said nothing.

“You’ll get into trouble if you play around, you young bride!” Sophia said. “Did you hear what happened to Mashenka, how she was kicked and beaten with the reins? Look out, or the same thing will happen to you!”

“I don’t care!” Varvara laughed into her handkerchief and whispered: “I’ve been having fun with the priest’s son.”

“You’re making it up!”

“I swear to God …”

“It’s a sin,” whispered Sophia.

“I don’t care! What should I be sorry for? If it’s a sin, then it’s a sin, and it’s better to be struck dead by lightning than to live as I am doing. I’m young and healthy. I’m saddled with a horrible, hunchbacked husband, and he’s worse than that damned Dyudya! Before I was married I never had enough to eat, I went barefoot, I had to get away from all that misery, and there was Alyoshka’s wealth tempting me, and so I became a slave, or a fish caught in a net, and I would sooner sleep with a serpent than with that scab-covered Alyoshka! And what about your life? It’s terrible to think about it! Your Fedor threw you out of the factory and sent you home to his father, and now he has taken another woman: they took your boy away and sold him into slavery. You work like a horse, and never hear a kind word! I’d rather spend my days an old maid and get half a ruble from the priest’s son, I’d rather beg for a pittance, I’d rather throw myself down a well.…”

“It’s a sin,” Sophia whispered again.

“I don’t care.”

From somewhere behind the church came the mournful song of three voices: two tenors and a bass. And again it was impossible to distinguish the words.

“They’re nightbirds all right,” Varvara said, laughing.

And she began to whisper about her nightly escapades with the priest’s son, and what he said to her, and what his friends were like, and how she carried on with the officials and merchants who came to the house. The mournful songs awoke in Sophia a longing for life and freedom, and she began to laugh. For her, it was all sinful and terrible and sweet to hear about, and she envied Varvara and was sorry that she too had not been a sinner when she was young and beautiful.

From the church cemetery came the twelve strokes of the watchman’s rattle, announcing midnight.

“It’s time to sleep,” Sophia said, getting up. “Dyudya will catch us if we don’t!”

They both went quietly into the courtyard.

“I went away and never heard what happened to Mashenka afterwards,” Varvara said, making her bed beneath the window.

“He said she died in prison. She poisoned her husband.”

Varvara lay down beside Sophia, deep in thought, and then she said softly: “I could kill Alyoshka and never regret it.”

“God help you, you are talking nonsense!”

When Sophia was dropping asleep, Varvara pressed close to her and whispered in her ear: “Let’s kill Dyudya and Alyoshka!”

Sophia shuddered and said nothing, but her eyes were open wide and for a long time she gazed steadily at the sky.

“People might find out,” she murmured.

“No, they would never find out. Dyudya is old, and it’s time for him to die, and they’d say Alyoshka had croaked from drinking!”

“It’s terrible.… God would strike us dead.…”

“I don’t care.”

Neither of them slept; they went on thinking in silence.

“It’s cold,” Sophia said, and she was beginning to shiver all over. “It will soon be light. Are you sleeping?”

“No.… Don’t listen to me, my dear,” Varvara whispered. “I get so mad with those damned swine, and sometimes I don’t know what I am saying. Go to sleep—the dawn will be coming up soon.… Are you asleep?”

They were both quiet, and soon they grew calm and fell asleep.

Old Afanasyevna was the first to wake up. She woke Sophia, and they both went to the cowshed to milk the cows. Then the hunchback Alyoshka walked in, hopelessly drunk, without his concertina, and with his knees and chest all covered with dust and straw—he must have fallen down on the road. Swaying from side to side, he went into the cowshed, and without undressing he rolled over on a sleigh and a moment later was snoring. And when the rising sun shone with a clear flame on the gold crosses of the church, and silvered the windows, and the shadows of the trees and the wellhead were strewn across the courtyard over the dew-wet grass, then Matvey Savvich rose and attended to business.

“Kuzka, get up!” he shouted. “Time to harness the horses! Get going!”

The morning uproar was about to begin. A young Jewess in a flounced brown dress led a horse to the yard for water. The pulley of the well creaked painfully, the bucket rattled. Still tired and sleepy, his clothes covered with dew, Kuzka sat up in the cart, and lazily slipping on his overcoat, he listened to the water splashing out of the bucket into the well, and all the time he was shivering from cold.

“Auntie!” shouted Matvey Savvich. “Tell that brat of mine to harness the horses!”

At the same moment Dyudya shouted from the window: “Sophia, make that Jewess pay a kopeck for watering the horses! They’re making a habit of it, the slobs!”

Up and down the street ran the bleating sheep; the peasant women were screeching at the shepherd, who played on his reed pipe, cracked his whip, and replied to them in his rough sleepy bass voice. Three sheep came running into the yard; not finding the gate, they butted the fence. Varvara was awakened by the noise, and taking up her bedding in her hands, she wandered into the house.

“You ought at least to drive the sheep out,” the old woman shouted after her. “Ladylike, eh?”

“What’s more, you needn’t think I’m going to work for a lot of Herods,” Varvara said as she entered the house.

The axles were greased and the horses harnessed. Dyudya emerged from the house with his accounts in his hands, sat down on the step, and began reckoning how much the travelers owed for oats, the night’s lodging, and watering the horses.

“Grandfather, you charged a lot for the oats,” Matvey Savvich said.

“If it’s too much, you don’t have to take it. We’re not forcing you!”

Just when the travelers were about to get into the cart and ride off, an accident occurred. Kuzka lost his cap.

“Where did you put it, you little swine?” Matvey Savvich roared at the boy. “Where is it?”

Kuzka’s face was contorted with terror; he searched all round the cart, and not finding it, he ran to the gate and then to the cowshed. The old woman and Sophia helped him look for it.

“I’ll rip your ears off!” Matvey Savvich shouted. “Filthy little brat!”

The cap was found at the bottom of the cart. Kuzka brushed off the straw, put it on, and crawled timidly into the cart, still wearing an expression of terror on his face, as though he expected a blow from behind. Matvey Savvich crossed himself, the driver pulled on the reins, and the cart rolled slowly out of the yard.

1891