character. At this point he, Lipa, and some girls who are collecting toadstools are representative of Chekhov's happy people, naive gentle people against a background of unhappiness and injustice. They meet people coming from the fair: 'A cart would drive by stirring up the dust and behind it would run an unsold horse, and it seemed glad it had not been sold.' There is a subtle emblematic connection here between Lipa and the happy 'unsold' horse. Lipa's owner has disappeared. And another point, reflecting the child theme: 'An old woman led a little boy in a big cap and big boots; the boy was tired out with the heat and the heavy boots which prevented him from bending his legs at the knees, but yet he blew a tin trumpet unceasingly with all his might. They had gone down the slope and turned into the street, but the trumpet could still be heard.' Lipa sees and hears that little boy because she herself is going to have a baby. In the passage 'Lipa and her mother who were born to poverty and prepared to live so till the end, giving up to others everything except their frightened, gentle souls, may perhaps have fancied for a minute that in this vast, mysterious world, among the endless series of lives, they too counted for something,' I recommend to your attention the words 'their frightened, gentle souls.' And notice too the beautiful little picture of the summer evening:
'At last they reached home. The mowers were sitting on the ground at the gates near the shop. As a rule the Ukleyevo peasants refused to work for Grigori, and he had to hire strangers, and now in the darkness it seemed as though there were men with long black beards sitting there. The shop was open, and through the doorway they could see the deaf man playing checkers with a boy. The mowers were singing softly, almost inaudibly, or were loudly demanding their wages for the previous day, but they were not paid for fear they should go away before tomorrow. Old Grigori, with his coat off, was sitting in his waistcoat with Aksinia under the birch-tree, drinking tea; a lighted lamp was on the table.
' 'I say, grandfather,' a mower called from outside the gates, as though teasing him, 'pay us half anyway! Hey, grandfather.'
'
On the next page Grigori realizes the silver rubles are false and gives them to Aksinia to throw away, but she uses them to pay the mowers. 'You mischievous woman,' cries Grigori, dumbfounded and alarmed. 'Why did you marry me into this family?' Lipa asks her mother. There is a certain gap in time after chapter 5.
One of the most striking passages in the story occurs in chapter 6, when absolutely and divinely indifferent to what is happening around her (the deserved fate of her idiotic husband and the terrible snake-evil coming from Aksinia), absolutely and divinely indifferent to all this evil, Lipa is engrossed in her child and proceeds to promise her little pinched baby her own most vivid vision, her only knowledge of life. She tosses him up and down and in rhythm with the tossing says in singsong tones : 'You will grow ever so big, ever so big. You will be a man, we shall work together! We shall wash floors together!' Just as her own most vivid childhood memories are linked up with washing floors. ' 'Why do I love him so much, Mamen'ka? Why do I feel so sorry for him!' she went on in a quivering voice, and her eyes glistened with tears. 'Who is he? What is he like? As light as a little feather, as a little crumb, but I love him, I love him as if he were a real person. Here he can do nothing, he can't talk, and yet I always know what his darling eyes tell me he wants.' '
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This chapter ends with the news that Anisim is to get six years of hard labor in Siberia. Then a nice touch is added; says old Grigori:
' 'I am worried about the money. Do you remember before his wedding Anisim's bringing me some new rubles and half-rubles? One parcel I put away at the time, but the others I mixed with my own money. When my uncle Dmitri Filatych—the kingdom of Heaven be his—was alive, he used to go to Moscow and to the Crimea to buy goods. He had a wife, and this same wife, when he was away buying goods, used to take up with other men. They had half a dozen children. And when uncle was in his cups he would laugh and say, 'I never can make out,' he used to say, 'which are my children and which are other people's.' An easy-going disposition, to be sure; and now I can't tell which are genuine rubles and which are false ones. And they all seem false to me. ... I buy a ticket at the station, I give the man three rubles, and I keep fancying they are counterfeit. And I am frightened. I must be ill.' '
From that moment he is mentally deranged and is redeemed, in a sense.
'He opened the door and crooking his finger, beckoned to Lipa. She went up to him with the baby in her arms.
' 'If there is anything you want, Lipynka, you ask for it,' he said. 'And eat anything you like, we don't grudge it, so long as it does you good. . . .' He made the sign of the cross over the baby. 'And take care of my grandchild. My son is gone, but my grandson is left.'
'Tears rolled down his cheeks; he gave a sob and went away. Soon afterwards he went to bed and slept soundly after seven sleepless nights.'
This was poor Lipa's happiest night —before the awful events that were to follow.
Grigori makes arrangements to give the land at Butyokino, which Aksinia wants for a brickyard, to his grandson. Aksinia is in a fury.
' 'Hey! Stepan,' she called to the deaf man, 'let us go home this minute! Let us go to my father and mother; I don't want to live with convicts. Get ready!'
'Clothes were hanging on lines stretched across the yard; she snatched off her petticoats and blouses still wet and flung them across the deaf man's stretched arms. Then in her fury she dashed about the yard where the linen hung, tore down all of it, and what was not hers she threw on the ground and trampled upon.
' 'Holy Saints, stop her,' moaned Varvara. 'What a woman! Give her Butyokino! Give it to her, for Christ's sake.' '
We come now to the climax.
'Aksinia ran into the kitchen where laundering was being done. Lipa was washing alone, the cook had gone to the river to rinse the clothes. Steam was rising from the trough and from the caldron near the stove, and the air in the kitchen was close and thick with vapor. On the floor was a heap of unwashed clothes, and Nikifor, kicking up his little red legs, lay on a bench near them, so that if he fell he should not hurt himself. Just as Aksinia went in Lipa took the former's shirt out of the heap and put it into the trough, and was just stretching out her hand to a big panlike dipper full of boiling water which was standing on the table.
'Give it here,' said Aksinia, looking at her with hatred, and snatching the shirt out of the trough; 'it is not your business to touch my linen! You are a convict's wife, and ought to know your place and who you are!'
'Lipa gazed at her in utter bewilderment; she did not understand, but suddenly she caught the look Aksinia turned upon the child, and at once she understood and went numb all over.
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'You've taken my land, so here you are!' Saying this Aksinia snatched up the dipper with the boiling water and splashed it over Nikifor.
Pages from Nabokov's teaching copy of 'In the Gully.'
'There followed a scream such as had never been heard before in Ukleyevo, and no one would have believed that a little weak creature like Lipa could scream like that. And it was suddenly quiet in the yard. Aksinia walked into the house in silence with the old naive smile on her lips. . . . The deaf man kept moving about the yard with his arms full of linen, then be began hanging it up again, silently, without haste. And until the cook came back from the river no one ventured into the kitchen to see what had happened there.'
The enemy is destroyed, Aksinia smiles once more; automatically the land is hers now. The deaf man hanging up the linen again is a stroke of genius on Chekhov's part.
The child theme is continued when Lipa comes on foot the long long way back from the hospital. Her baby has died; she carries his little body wrapped in a blanket.
'Lipa went down the road, and before reaching the hamlet sat down by a small pond. A woman brought a horse to water but the horse would not drink. 'What more do you want?' the woman said to it softly, in perplexity.
