Fifty-Two Stories

The white cloudy sky, the riverbank trees, the bulrushes, and the boats with people and oars were reflected in the water as in a mirror; under the boats, far down in the depths, in the bottomless abyss, there was also a sky and flying birds. One bank, on which the manor house stood, was high, steep, and all covered with trees; on the other, gently sloping, wide water-meadows showed greenly and creeks glistened. The boats went some hundred yards and, beyond the mournfully drooping willows, on the sloping bank, appeared cottages and a herd of cows; there was singing, drunken shouting, and the sounds of a concertina.

Boats darted here and there on the river with fishermen going to set their nets for the night. In one little boat sat some reveling music-lovers, playing homemade violins and cellos.

Olga Mikhailovna sat at the tiller. She smiled affably and talked a lot to entertain her guests, while casting sidelong glances at her husband. He floated in his dugout ahead of everybody, standing and working one oar. His light, sharp-prowed little dugout, which the guests all called a deathtrap, and Pyotr Dmitrich for some reason called Penderaklia,¹² raced along quickly; it had a lively, cunning expression and seemed to hate the heavy Pyotr Dmitrich, waiting for an appropriate moment to slip from under his feet. Olga Mikhailovna kept glancing at her husband, and was repulsed by his good looks, which everyone admired, the nape of his neck, his pose, his familiar manner with women; she hated all the women sitting in her boat, was jealous, and at the same time kept jumping every moment, afraid that the unsteady little dugout might turn over and cause a disaster.

“Easy, Pyotr!” she cried, her heart sinking with fear. “Get into the boat. We believe you’re brave without that!”

She was also uneasy about the people sitting in the boat with her. They were all ordinary people, not bad, like many others, but now each of them seemed extraordinary and bad to her. In each of them she saw nothing but falseness. “Take,” she thought, “that brown-haired young man with gold-rimmed spectacles and a handsome little beard, now working an oar: he’s a rich, well-nourished, and eternally happy mama’s boy, whom everyone considers an honest, freethinking, progressive man. It’s not even a year since he finished university and came to live in the district, but he already says of himself: ‘We zemstvo activists.’¹³ But a year will go by, and he, like so many others, will get bored, leave for Petersburg, and, to justify his flight, will go around saying that the zemstvo is good for nothing and he’s disappointed. And from the other boat his young wife never takes her eyes off him, and believes that he’s a ‘zemstvo activist,’ just as she’ll believe a year from now that the zemstvo is good for nothing. Or take that plump, clean-shaven gentleman in the straw hat with a wide ribbon and with an expensive cigar in his teeth. That one likes to say: ‘It’s time we abandoned fantasies and got down to business!’ He has Yorkshire pigs, Butlerov’s beehives,¹⁴ rapeseed, pineapples, an oil press, a cheese dairy, and Italian double-entry bookkeeping. Yet every summer, in order to spend the fall with his mistress in Crimea, he sells some forest for felling and mortgages his land bit by bit. Or take Uncle Nikolai Nikolaich, who is angry with Pyotr Dmitrich and yet for some reason doesn’t go home!”

Olga Mikhailovna kept looking at the other boats, and saw in them only uninteresting cranks, play-actors or small-minded people. She recalled all those she knew in the district, and could not recall a single person of whom she could say or think anything good. To her they all seemed giftless, bland, limited, narrow-minded, false, heartless, they all said what they did not think and did what they did not want. Boredom and despair stifled her; she wanted to suddenly stop smiling, jump up and shout: “I’m sick of you!” and then leap from the boat and swim ashore.

“Gentlemen, let’s take Pyotr Dmitrich in tow!” someone shouted.

“In tow! In tow!” all the others chimed in. “Olga Mikhailovna, take your husband in tow.”

To take him in tow, Olga Mikhailovna, who was sitting at the tiller, had to seize the moment and deftly catch hold of the Penderaklia by the chain at the bow. As she leaned over for the chain, Pyotr Dmitrich winced and looked at her in alarm.

“I hope you won’t catch cold here!” he said.

“If you fear for me and the child, why do you torment me?” thought Olga Mikhailovna.

Pyotr Dmitrich admitted defeat and, not wishing to be towed, jumped from the Penderaklia into the boat, which was already crammed with passengers, and he jumped so carelessly that the boat heeled over badly and everyone cried out in terror.

“He jumped like that to please the women,” Olga Mikhailovna thought. “He knows it looks good…”