Fifty-Two Stories

Agafya stepped onto the bank and went off across the field to the village. At first she walked rather boldly, but then agitation and fear claimed their own: she turned in fright, stopped, and caught her breath.

“See, it’s scary!” Savka smiled sadly, looking at the bright green stripe Agafya left on the dewy grass. “She doesn’t want to go! The husband’s been standing there waiting for a whole hour…Did you see him?”

Savka said these last words with a smile, but they chilled my heart. In the village, by the last cottage, on the road, Yakov stood and stared fixedly at his returning wife. He did not stir and was still as a post. What was he thinking as he looked at her? What words had he prepared for their meeting? Agafya stood for a time, looked back once, as if expecting help from us, and went on. I had never yet seen anyone walk like that, either drunk or sober. It was as if Agafya writhed under her husband’s gaze. She walked in zigzags, then stamped in place, her knees bending and her arms spreading, then backed up a little. Having gone some hundred steps forward, she looked back again and sat down.

“You should at least hide behind a bush,” I said to Savka. “What if the husband sees you…”

“He knows who Agasha’s coming from anyway…It’s not for cabbage that women go to the kitchen gardens at night—everybody knows that.”

I looked at Savka’s face. It was pale and wincing from squeamish pity, as with people when they see an animal tortured.

“The cat laughs, the mouse weeps…,” he sighed.

Agafya suddenly jumped to her feet, shook her head, and, stepping boldly, went to meet her husband. She had evidently gathered her forces and made up her mind.

1886

SPRING

THE SNOW HAS NOT YET LEFT THE GROUND, but spring is already calling on the soul. If you have ever convalesced from a grave illness, you know the blissful state when you swoon from vague presentiments and smile without any reason. Evidently that is the state nature is experiencing now. The ground is cold, mud mixed with snow sloshes under your feet, but everything around is so cheerful, affectionate, friendly! The air is so clear and transparent that it seems if you climbed up on a dovecot or a belfry you could see the whole universe from end to end. The sun shines brightly, and its rays, playing and smiling, bathe in the puddles along with the sparrows. The river swells and darkens; it is already awake, and will start roaring any day now. The trees are bare, but already living, breathing.

In that season it feels good to drive dirty water along the gutters with a broom or a shovel, to send toy boats down the streams, or crack the stubborn ice with your heels. It also feels good to drive pigeons high up into the heavens, or to climb trees and tie birdhouses in them. Yes, everything feels good in that happy time of year, especially if you’re young, love nature, and if you’re not capricious, hysterical, and your job does not oblige you to sit between four walls from morning till evening. It’s not good if you’re sick, if you’re pining away in an office, if you keep company with the muses.

Yes, in spring one should not keep company with the muses.

Just look how good, how nice ordinary people feel. Here’s the gardener Pantelei Petrovich, bright and early, sporting a broad-brimmed straw hat, and quite unable to part with the little stub of a cigar he picked up this morning on the path; look at him standing, arms akimbo, outside the kitchen window, telling the cook about the boots he bought the day before. His whole long and narrow figure, for which the servants call him “scrimpy,” expresses self-satisfaction and dignity. He looks upon nature with the awareness of his superiority over it, and there is in his gaze something proprietary, peremptory, and even supercilious, as if, sitting in his greenhouse or pottering in the garden, he has learned about the vegetable kingdom something that no one else knows.

It would be useless to explain to him that nature is majestic, awesome, and filled with wondrous charms, before which the proud man should bow his head. It seems to him that he knows everything, all the secrets, charms, and wonders, and for him the beautiful spring is as much of a slave as the narrow-chested, haggard woman who sits in the shed of the greenhouse and ladles out meatless cabbage soup to his children.