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My Life -
Chekhov
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VIII
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XIX XX
X Two days later she sent me to Dubetchnya and I was unutterably
delighted to go. As I walked towards the station and afterwards,
as I was sitting in the train, I kept laughing from no apparent
cause, and people looked at me as though I were drunk. Snow was
falling, and there were still frosts in the mornings, but the
roads were already dark-coloured and rooks hovered over them,
cawing.
At first I had intended to fit up an abode for us two, Masha and
me, in the lodge at the side opposite Madame Tcheprakov's lodge,
but it appeared that the doves and the ducks had been living
there for a long time, and it was impossible to clean it without
destroying a great number of nests. There was nothing for it but
to live in the comfortless rooms of the big house with the
sunblinds. The peasants called the house the palace; there were
more than twenty rooms in it, and the only furniture was a piano
and a child's arm-chair lying in the attic. And if Masha had
brought all her furniture from the town we should even then have
been unable to get rid of the impression of immense emptiness
and cold. I picked out three small rooms with windows looking
into the garden, and worked from early morning till night,
setting them to rights, putting in new panes, papering the
walls, filling up the holes and chinks in the floors. It was
easy, pleasant work. I was continually running to the river to
see whether the ice were not going; I kept fancying that
starlings were flying. And at night, thinking of Masha, I
listened with an unutterably sweet feeling, with clutching
delight to the noise of the rats and the wind droning and
knocking above the ceiling. It seemed as though some old house
spirit were coughing in the attic.
The snow was deep; a great deal had fallen even at the end of
March, but it melted quickly, as though by magic, and the spring
floods passed in a tumultuous rush, so that by the beginning of
April the starlings were already noisy, and yellow butterflies
were flying in the garden. It was exquisite weather. Every day,
towards evening, I used to walk to the town to meet Masha, and
what a delight it was to walk with bare feet along the gradually
drying, still soft road. Half-way I used to sit down and look
towards the town, not venturing to go near it. The sight of it
troubled me. I kept wondering how the people I knew would behave
to me when they heard of my love. What would my father say? What
troubled me particularly was the thought that my life was more
complicated, and that I had completely lost all power to set it
right, and that, like a balloon, it was bearing me away, God
knows whither. I no longer considered the problem how to earn my
daily bread, how to live, but thought about -- I really don't
know what.
Masha used to come in a carriage; I used to get in with her, and
we drove to Dubetchnya, feeling light-hearted and free. Or,
after waiting till the sun had set, I would go back dissatisfied
and dreary, wondering why Masha had not come; at the gate or in
the garden I would be met by a sweet, unexpected apparition --
it was she! It would turn out that she had come by rail, and had
walked from the station. What a festival it was! In a simple
woollen dress with a kerchief on her head, with a modest
sunshade, but laced in, slender, in expensive foreign boots --
it was a talented actress playing the part of a little workgirl.
We looked round our domain and decided which should be her room,
and which mine, where we would have our avenue, our kitchen
garden, our beehives.
We already had hens, ducks, and geese, which we loved because
they were ours. We had, all ready for sowing, oats, clover,
timothy grass, buckwheat, and vegetable seeds, and we always
looked at all these stores and discussed at length the crop we
might get; and everything Masha said to me seemed
extraordinarily clever, and fine. This was the happiest time of
my life.
Soon after St. Thomas's week we were married at our parish
church in the village of Kurilovka, two miles from Dubetchnya.
Masha wanted everything to be done quietly; at her wish our
"best men" were peasant lads, the sacristan sang alone, and we
came back from the church in a small, jolting chaise which she
drove herself. Our only guest from the town was my sister
Kleopatra, to whom Masha sent a note three days before the
wedding. My sister came in a white dress and wore gloves. During
the wedding she cried quietly from joy and tenderness. Her
expression was motherly and infinitely kind. She was intoxicated
with our happiness, and smiled as though she were absorbing a
sweet delirium, and looking at her during our wedding, I
realized that for her there was nothing in the world higher than
love, earthly love, and that she was dreaming of it secretly,
timidly, but continually and passionately. She embraced and
kissed Masha, and, not knowing how to express her rapture, said
to her of me: "He is good! He is very good!"
Before she went away she changed into her ordinary dress, and
drew me into the garden to talk to me alone.
"Father is very much hurt," she said, "that you have written
nothing to him. You ought to have asked for his blessing. But in
reality he is very much pleased. He says that this marriage will
raise you in the eyes of all society, and that under the
influence of Mariya Viktorovna you will begin to take a more
serious view of life. We talk of nothing but you in the evenings
now, and yesterday he actually used the expression: 'Our
Misail.' That pleased me. It seems as though he had some plan in
his mind, and I fancy he wants to set you an example of
magnanimity and be the first to speak of reconciliation. It is
very possible he may come here to see you in a day or two."
She hurriedly made the sign of the cross over me several times
and said:
"Well, God be with you. Be happy. Anyuta Blagovo is a very
clever girl; she says about your marriage that God is sending
you a fresh ordeal. To be sure -- married life does not bring
only joy but suffering too. That's bound to be so."
Masha and I walked a couple of miles to see her on her way; we
walked back slowly and in silence, as though we were resting.
Masha held my hand, my heart felt light, and I had no
inclination to talk about love; we had become closer and more
akin now that we were married, and we felt that nothing now
could separate us.
"Your sister is a nice creature," said Masha, "but it seems as
though she had been tormented for years. Your father must be a
terrible man."
I began telling her how my sister and I had been brought up, and
what a senseless torture our childhood had really been. When she
heard how my father had so lately beaten me, she shuddered and
drew closer to me.
"Don't tell me any more," she said. "It's horrible!"
Now she never left me. We lived together in the three rooms in
the big house, and in the evenings we bolted the door which led
to the empty part of the house, as though someone were living
there whom we did not know, and were afraid of. I got up early,
at dawn, and immediately set to work of some sort. I mended the
carts, made paths in the garden, dug the flower beds, painted
the roof of the house. When the time came to sow the oats I
tried to plough the ground over again, to harrow and to sow, and
I did it all conscientiously, keeping up with our labourer; I
was worn out, the rain and the cold wind made my face and feet
burn for hours afterwards. I dreamed of ploughed land at night.
But field labour did not attract me. I did not understand
farming, and I did not care for it; it was perhaps because my
forefathers had not been tillers of the soil, and the very blood
that flowed in my veins was purely of the city. I loved nature
tenderly; I loved the fields and meadows and kitchen gardens,
but the peasant who turned up the soil with his plough and urged
on his pitiful horse, wet and tattered, with his craning neck,
was to me the expression of coarse, savage, ugly force, and
every time I looked at his uncouth movements I involuntarily
began thinking of the legendary life of the remote past, before
men knew the use of fire. The fierce bull that ran with the
peasants' herd, and the horses, when they dashed about the
village, stamping their hoofs, moved me to fear, and everything
rather big, strong, and angry, whether it was the ram with its
horns, the gander, or the yard-dog, seemed to me the expression
of the same coarse, savage force. This mood was particularly
strong in me in bad weather, when heavy clouds were hanging over
the black ploughed land. Above all, when I was ploughing or
sowing, and two or three people stood looking how I was doing
it, I had not the feeling that this work was inevitable and
obligatory, and it seemed to me that I was amusing myself. I
preferred doing something in the yard, and there was nothing I
liked so much as painting the roof.
I used to walk through the garden and the meadow to our mill. It
was let to a peasant of Kurilovka called Stepan, a handsome,
dark fellow with a thick black beard, who looked very strong. He
did not like the miller's work, and looked upon it as dreary and
unprofitable, and only lived at the mill in order not to live at
home. He was a leather-worker, and was always surrounded by a
pleasant smell of tar and leather. He was not fond of talking,
he was listless and sluggish, and was always sitting in the
doorway or on the river bank, humming "oo-loo-loo." His wife and
mother-in-law, both white-faced, languid, and meek, used
sometimes to come from Kurilovka to see him; they made low bows
to him and addressed him formally, "Stepan Petrovitch," while he
went on sitting on the river bank, softly humming "oo-loo-loo,"
without responding by word or movement to their bows. One hour
and then a second would pass in silence. His mother-in-law and
wife, after whispering together, would get up and gaze at him
for some time, expecting him to look round; then they would make
a low bow, and in sugary, chanting voices, say:
"Good-bye, Stepan Petrovitch!"
And they would go away. After that Stepan, picking up the parcel
they had left, containing cracknels or a shirt, would heave a
sigh and say, winking in their direction:
"The female sex!"
The mill with two sets of millstones worked day and night. I
used to help Stepan; I liked the work, and when he went off I
was glad to stay and take his place.
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