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A. Chekhov
- The New Villa
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III Elena Ivanovna and her little daughter visited the village on
foot. They were out for a walk. It was a Sunday, and the peasant
women and girls were walking up and down the street in their
brightly-coloured dresses. Rodion and Stepanida, sitting side by
side at their door, bowed and smiled to Elena Ivanovna and her
little daughter as to acquaintances. From the windows more than
a dozen children stared at them; their faces expressed amazement
and curiosity, and they could be heard whispering:
"The Kutcherov lady has come! The Kutcherov lady!"
"Good-morning," said Elena Ivanovna, and she stopped; she
paused, and then asked: "Well, how are you getting on?"
"We get along all right, thank God," answered Rodion, speaking
rapidly. "To be sure we get along."
"The life we lead!" smiled Stepanida. "You can see our poverty
yourself, dear lady! The family is fourteen souls in all, and
only two bread-winners. We are supposed to be blacksmiths, but
when they bring us a horse to shoe we have no coal, nothing to
buy it with. We are worried to death, lady," she went on, and
laughed. "Oh, oh, we are worried to death."
Elena Ivanovna sat down at the entrance and, putting her arm
round her little girl, pondered something, and judging from the
little girl's expression, melancholy thoughts were straying
through her mind, too; as she brooded she played with the
sumptuous lace on the parasol she had taken out of her mother's
hands.
"Poverty," said Rodion, "a great deal of anxiety -- you see no
end to it. Here, God sends no rain . . . our life is not easy,
there is no denying it."
"You have a hard time in this life," said Elena Ivanovna, "but
in the other world you will be happy."
Rodion did not understand her, and simply coughed into his
clenched hand by way of reply. Stepanida said:
"Dear lady, the rich men will be all right in the next world,
too. The rich put up candles, pay for services; the rich give to
beggars, but what can the poor man do? He has no time to make
the sign of the cross. He is the beggar of beggars himself; how
can he think of his soul? And many sins come from poverty; from
trouble we snarl at one another like dogs, we haven't a good
word to say to one another, and all sorts of things happen, dear
lady -- God forbid! It seems we have no luck in this world nor
the next. All the luck has fallen to the rich."
She spoke gaily; she was evidently used to talking of her hard
life. And Rodion smiled, too; he was pleased that his old woman
was so clever, so ready of speech.
"It is only on the surface that the rich seem to be happy," said
Elena Ivanovna. "Every man has his sorrow. Here my husband and I
do not live poorly, we have means, but are we happy? I am young,
but I have had four children; my children are always being ill.
I am ill, too, and constantly being doctored."
"And what is your illness?" asked Rodion.
"A woman's complaint. I get no sleep; a continual headache gives
me no peace. Here I am sitting and talking, but my head is bad,
I am weak all over, and I should prefer the hardest labour to
such a condition. My soul, too, is troubled; I am in continual
fear for my children, my husband. Every family has its own
trouble of some sort; we have ours. I am not of noble birth. My
grandfather was a simple peasant, my father was a tradesman in
Moscow; he was a plain, uneducated man, too, while my husband's
parents were wealthy and distinguished. They did not want him to
marry me, but he disobeyed them, quarrelled with them, and they
have not forgiven us to this day. That worries my husband; it
troubles him and keeps him in constant agitation; he loves his
mother, loves her dearly. So I am uneasy, too, my soul is in
pain."
Peasants, men and women, were by now standing round Rodion's hut
and listening. Kozov came up, too, and stood twitching his long,
narrow beard. The Lytchkovs, father and son, drew near.
"And say what you like, one cannot be happy and satisfied if one
does not feel in one's proper place." Elena Ivanovna went on.
"Each of you has his strip of land, each of you works and knows
what he is working for; my husband builds bridges -- in short,
everyone has his place, while I, I simply walk about. I have not
my bit to work. I don't work, and feel as though I were an
outsider. I am saying all this that you may not judge from
outward appearances; if a man is expensively dressed and has
means it does not prove that he is satisfied with his life."
She got up to go away and took her daughter by the hand.
"I like your place here very much," she said, and smiled, and
from that faint, diffident smile one could tell how unwell she
really was, how young and how pretty; she had a pale, thinnish
face with dark eyebrows and fair hair. And the little girl was
just such another as her mother: thin, fair, and slender. There
was a fragrance of scent about them.
"I like the river and the forest and the village," Elena
Ivanovna went on; "I could live here all my life, and I feel as
though here I should get strong and find my place. I want to
help you -- I want to dreadfully -- to be of use, to be a real
friend to you. I know your need, and what I don't know I feel,
my heart guesses. I am sick, feeble, and for me perhaps it is
not possible to change my life as I would. But I have children.
I will try to bring them up that they may be of use to you, may
love you. I shall impress upon them continually that their life
does not belong to them, but to you. Only I beg you earnestly, I
beseech you, trust us, live in friendship with us. My husband is
a kind, good man. Don't worry him, don't irritate him. He is
sensitive to every trifle, and yesterday, for instance, your
cattle were in our vegetable garden, and one of your people
broke down the fence to the bee-hives, and such an attitude to
us drives my husband to despair. I beg you," she went on in an
imploring voice, and she clasped her hands on her bosom -- "I
beg you to treat us as good neighbours; let us live in peace!
There is a saying, you know, that even a bad peace is better
than a good quarrel, and, 'Don't buy property, but buy
neighbours.' I repeat my husband is a kind man and good; if all
goes well we promise to do everything in our power for you; we
will mend the roads, we will build a school for your children. I
promise you."
"Of course we thank you humbly, lady," said Lytchkov the father,
looking at the ground; "you are educated people; it is for you
to know best. Only, you see, Voronov, a rich peasant at
Eresnevo, promised to build a school; he, too, said, 'I will do
this for you,' 'I will do that for you,' and he only put up the
framework and refused to go on. And then they made the peasants
put the roof on and finish it; it cost them a thousand roubles.
Voronov did not care; he only stroked his beard, but the
peasants felt it a bit hard."
"That was a crow, but now there's a rook, too," said Kozov, and
he winked.
There was the sound of laughter.
"We don't want a school," said Volodka sullenly. "Our children
go to Petrovskoe, and they can go on going there; we don't want
it."
Elena Ivanovna seemed suddenly intimidated; her face looked
paler and thinner, she shrank into herself as though she had
been touched with something coarse, and walked away without
uttering another word. And she walked more and more quickly,
without looking round.
"Lady," said Rodion, walking after her, "lady, wait a bit; hear
what I would say to you."
He followed her without his cap, and spoke softly as though
begging.
"Lady, wait and hear what I will say to you."
They had walked out of the village, and Elena Ivanovna stopped
beside a cart in the shade of an old mountain ash.
"Don't be offended, lady," said Rodion. "What does it mean? Have
patience. Have patience for a couple of years. You will live
here, you will have patience, and it will all come round. Our
folks are good and peaceable; there's no harm in them; it's
God's truth I'm telling you. Don't mind Kozov and the Lytchkovs,
and don't mind Volodka. He's a fool; he listens to the first
that speaks. The others are quiet folks; they are silent. Some
would be glad, you know, to say a word from the heart and to
stand up for themselves, but cannot. They have a heart and a
conscience, but no tongue. Don't be offended . . . have
patience. . . . What does it matter?"
Elena Ivanovna looked at the broad, tranquil river, pondering,
and tears flowed down her cheeks. And Rodion was troubled by
those tears; he almost cried himself.
"Never mind . . ." he muttered. "Have patience for a couple of
years. You can have the school, you can have the roads, only not
all at once. If you went, let us say, to sow corn on that mound
you would first have to weed it out, to pick out all the stones,
and then to plough, and work and work . . . and with the people,
you see, it is the same . . . you must work and work until you
overcome them."
The crowd had moved away from Rodion's hut, and was coming along
the street towards the mountain ash. They began singing songs
and playing the concertina, and they kept coming closer and
closer. . . .
"Mamma, let us go away from here," said the little girl,
huddling up to her mother, pale and shaking all over; "let us go
away, mamma!
"Where?"
"To Moscow. . . . Let us go, mamma."
The child began crying.
Rodion was utterly overcome; his face broke into profuse
perspiration; he took out of his pocket a little crooked
cucumber, like a half-moon, covered with crumbs of rye bread,
and began thrusting it into the little girl's hands.
"Come, come," he muttered, scowling severely; "take the little
cucumber, eat it up. . . . You mustn't cry. Mamma will whip you.
. . . She'll tell your father of you when you get home. Come,
come. . . ."
They walked on, and he still followed behind them, wanting to
say something friendly and persuasive to them. And seeing that
they were both absorbed in their own thoughts and their own
griefs, and not noticing him, he stopped and, shading his eyes
from the sun, looked after them for a long time till they
disappeared into their copse.
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