Fifty-Two Stories

“Now judge for yourself, what will come of it?” her uncle went on, blocking her way. “How will this playing the conservative and the generalissimo end? He’s already being taken to court! To court! I’m very glad! His shouting and showing off have landed him in the dock! And not in the circuit court or whatever, but in the appellate court! It’s hard to think up anything worse! Second, he’s quarreled with everybody! Today is his name-day and, look, neither Vostryakov, nor Yakhontov, nor Vladimirov, nor Shevud, nor the count has come…It seems there’s nobody more conservative than Count Alexei Petrovich—and even he hasn’t come. And he’ll never come again! You’ll see, he won’t come!”

“Ah, my God, but what have I got to do with it?” Olga Mikhailovna asked.

“What do you mean, what? You’re his wife! You’re intelligent, you’ve taken courses, it’s in your power to make an honest worker of him!”

“My courses didn’t teach how to influence difficult people. It seems I’ll have to apologize to you all for having taken courses!” Olga Mikhailovna said sharply. “Listen, Uncle, if you heard the same scales being played right in your ear all day long, you wouldn’t just sit and listen, you’d run away. All year round, all day long, I hear the same thing over and over. You must finally take pity, gentlemen!”

Her uncle assumed a very serious expression, then looked at her inquisitively and twisted his lips into a mocking smile.

“So that’s how it is!” he intoned in an old-womanish voice. “Sorry, ma’am!” he said and bowed ceremoniously. “If you yourself have fallen under his influence and changed your convictions, you should have told me sooner. Sorry, ma’am!”

“Yes, I’ve changed my convictions!” she cried. “Rejoice!”

“Sorry, ma’am!”

Her uncle bowed ceremoniously for a last time, somehow sideways, and, hunching up, scraped his foot and went back inside.

“Fool,” thought Olga Mikhailovna. “Let him take himself home.”

She found the ladies and the young people in the raspberry patch by the kitchen garden. Some were eating raspberries; others, who were already sick of raspberries, wandered through the beds of strawberries or rummaged among the sweet peas. A little to one side of the raspberry patch, by a sprawling apple tree, propped up all around with palings pulled from an old fence, Pyotr Dmitrich was mowing the grass. His hair fell over his forehead, his necktie was untied, his watch chain hung from the buttonhole. His every step and swing of the scythe showed skill and the presence of enormous physical strength. Next to him stood Lyubochka and the daughters of a neighbor, Colonel Bukreev, Natalya and Valentina, or, as everybody called them, Nata and Vata, anemic and unhealthily fat blond girls of about sixteen or seventeen, in white dresses, looking remarkably alike. Pyotr Dmitrich was teaching them to mow.

“It’s very simple…,” he was saying. “You need only know how to hold the scythe and not get too excited, that is, not use more strength than necessary. Like this…Want to give it a try?” He offered the scythe to Lyubochka. “Go on!”

Lyubochka clumsily took hold of the scythe, suddenly blushed and laughed.

“Don’t be shy, Lyubov Alexandrovna!” Olga Mikhailovna shouted loudly enough for the other ladies to hear her and know she was with them. “Don’t be shy! You must learn! You’ll marry a Tolstoyan, and he’ll make you mow.”⁸

Lyubochka raised the scythe, but burst out laughing again and, weak from laughter, lowered it at once. She was embarrassed and pleased to be spoken to as a grown-up. Nata, not smiling and not embarrassed, with a cold, serious face, took the scythe, swung it, and got it tangled in the grass; Vata, also not smiling, cold and serious like her sister, silently took the scythe and stuck it into the ground. Having accomplished that, the two sisters linked arms and silently went off to the raspberry patch.

Pyotr Dmitrich laughed and frolicked like a little boy, and this childishly frolicksome mood, when he became exceedingly good-natured, suited him much more than any other. Olga Mikhailovna loved him like that. But his boyishness usually did not last long. And this time, too, having frolicked with the scythe, he found it necessary for some reason to give a serious tinge to his frolicking.

“When I’m mowing, I feel myself more healthy and normal,” he said. “If I were forced to be content only with intellectual life, I think I’d go out of my mind. I feel that I wasn’t born a cultivated man! I want to mow, to plow, to sow, to break in horses…”

And a conversation began between Pyotr Dmitrich and the ladies about the advantages of physical work, about culture, then about the harmfulness of money, of property. Listening to her husband, Olga Mikhailovna for some reason remembered about her dowry.

“The time will come,” she thought, “when he will not forgive me for being richer than he is. He’s proud and touchy. He may well come to hate me because he owes me so much.”