Fifty-Two Stories

“And our heartfelt thanks!”

Marya Vassilyevna was enjoying her tea, and was becoming as red as the peasants herself, and again she thought about the firewood, the caretaker…

“Hold on, lad!” reached her from the next table. “She’s the teacher from Vyazovye…we know her! A nice young lady.”

“A decent one!”

The door on the pulley kept slamming, people came in, others went out. Marya Vassilyevna sat and went on thinking about the same things, and the concertina behind the wall went on playing and playing. There were patches of sunlight on the floor, then they moved to the counter, to the wall, and disappeared completely; that meant the sun had gone past noon. The peasants at the next table were preparing to leave. The little peasant, staggering slightly, went up to Marya Vassilyevna and gave her his hand; looking at him, the others all gave her their hands as they left and went out one after the other, and the door on the pulley squealed and slammed nine times.

“Vassilyevna, get ready!” called Semyon.

They set off. And again slowly all the time.

“A while ago they were building a school here, in their Nizhny Gorodishche,” said Semyon, turning around. “There was no end of wrongdoing!”

“How so?”

“Seems the chairman put a thousand in his pocket, and the custodian another thousand, and the teacher five hundred.”

“The whole school costs a thousand. It’s not nice to slander people, grandpa. It’s all nonsense.”

“I don’t know…I say what folk say.”

But it was clear that Semyon did not believe the teacher. The peasants did not believe her; they had always thought that she received too big a salary—twenty-one roubles a month (five would have been enough)—and that, of the money she collected from the pupils for firewood and the caretaker, she kept the greater part for herself. The custodian thought the same as all the peasants, and he himself made something from the firewood and also got a salary from the peasants for his duties, in secret from the authorities.

The forest ended, thank God, and now there would be level fields all the way to Vyazovye. And there was already not far to go: cross the river, then the railroad tracks, and there was Vyazovye.

“Where are you going?” Marya Vassilyevna asked Semyon. “Take the road to the right over the bridge.”

“Wha? We’ll cross over this way. It ain’t all that deep.”

“See you don’t drown the horse on us.”

“Wha?”

“There’s Khanov crossing the bridge,” Marya Vassilyevna said, seeing a coach and four to the right. “That’s him, isn’t it?”

“Y-yes. Must not have found Bakvist. What a dumbbell, Lord help him, going that way, and why, this way’s a good two miles shorter.”

They drove to the river. In summer it was a shallow little stream that could easily be forded and by August had usually dried up, but now, after the spring floods, it was a river some forty feet wide, swift, muddy, cold; on the bank and right down to the water, fresh tracks could be seen—meaning someone had crossed there.

“Giddap!” Semyon shouted angrily and anxiously, snapping hard on the reins and raising his elbows like a bird its wings. “Giddap!”

The horse went into the water up to its belly and stopped, but went on again at once, straining its forces, and Marya Vassilyevna felt a sharp cold on her legs.

“Giddap!” she also shouted, standing up. “Giddap!”

They drove out onto the bank.

“And what is it, this thing, Lord,” Semyon muttered, adjusting the harness. “Sheer punishment, this zemstvo…”

Her galoshes and shoes were full of water, the hem of her dress and coat, and one sleeve as well, were wet and dripping; the sugar and flour turned out to be damp—that was the most annoying thing of all, and in her despair Marya Vassilyevna only clasped her hands and said:

“Oh, Semyon, Semyon!…You’re really something!…”

The barrier at the railway crossing was lowered: an express train was coming from the station. Marya Vassilyevna stood at the crossing waiting for it to pass and trembling all over from the cold. Vyazovye could already be seen—the school with its green roof and the church with its crosses ablaze, reflecting the evening sun; and the windows of the station were also ablaze, and the locomotive gave off pinkish smoke…And it seemed to her that everything was trembling from the cold.