Old Grigory Petrovich is considered the proprietor, as before, but in fact everything has passed into Aksinya’s hands; she sells and buys, and nothing can be done without her consent. The brickworks is going well; owing to the demand for bricks for the railway, the price has gone up to twenty-four roubles a thousand; women and girls cart bricks to the station and load them on the cars, and get twenty-five kopecks a day for it.
Aksinya has gone shares with the Khrymins, and their factory is now called “Khrymin Junior and Co.” They’ve opened a tavern by the station, and now play the expensive accordion not at the factory but in this tavern, and the place is frequented by the postmaster, who has also started some sort of business, and by the stationmaster. The Khrymin Juniors have presented deaf Stepan with a gold watch, and he is forever taking it out of his pocket and holding it to his ear.
In the village they say of Aksinya that she has acquired great power; and it is true that when she goes to her brickworks in the morning, with her naive smile, beautiful, happy, and then when she gives orders at the brickworks, great power is felt in her. Everyone fears her at home, and in the village, and in the brickworks. When she comes to the post office, the postmaster jumps to his feet and says to her:
“I humbly beg you to be seated, Xenia Abramovna.”
A certain landowner, a fop in a fine flannel jacket and high patent-leather boots, an elderly man, was once selling her a horse, and got so carried away by his conversation with her that he let the horse go for what she offered. He held her hand for a long time and, looking into her merry, sly, naive eyes, said:
“For a woman like you, Xenia Abramovna, I’m ready to do any pleasure. Only tell me when we can see each other, so that no one will bother us?”
“Why, whenever you like!”
And since then the elderly fop comes to the shop almost every day to drink beer. The beer is terribly bitter, like wormwood. The landowner wags his head but drinks.
Old Tsybukin no longer mixes in the business. He carries no money on him, because he cannot distinguish real money from false, but he keeps mum and tells no one about this weakness of his. He has become somehow forgetful, and if he is not given anything to eat, he will not ask himself; they are already used to eating without him, and Varvara often says:
“Our man went to bed again last night without eating.”
And she says it indifferently, because she is used to it. For some reason, summer and winter alike, he goes about in a fur coat and only on very hot days does not go out but sits at home. Ordinarily, he puts his coat on and turns up the collar, wraps himself up, and strolls around the village, along the road to the station, or else sits from morning till evening on a bench by the church gate. He sits and does not stir. Passersby bow to him, but he does not respond, because he dislikes peasants as much as ever. When someone asks him something, he replies quite reasonably and politely, but briefly.
The talk going round the village is that his daughter-in-law has driven him out of his own house and gives him nothing to eat, and that he supposedly lives by begging: some are glad, others are sorry
Varvara has grown still more plump and white and does good deeds as before, and Aksinya does not interfere with her. There is now such a quantity of preserves that there is no time to eat it before the new berries come; it crystallizes, and Varvara all but weeps, not knowing what to do with it.
They have begun to forget about Anisim. A letter came from him once, written in verse, on a big sheet of paper with the look of a petition, in the same magnificent hand. Evidently his friend Samorodov was serving his term together with him. Below the verses, in a poor, barely legible hand, a single line was written: “I’m sick all the time here, it’s hard for me, help me, for Christ’s sake.”
Once—this was on a clear autumn day, before evening—old man Tsybukin was sitting by the church gates, the collar of his coat turned up, so that only his nose and the visor of his cap could be seen. At the other end of the long bench sat the contractor Yelizarov and beside him the school watchman, Yakov, a toothless old man of about seventy. Crutch and the watchman were talking.
“Children must give their old parents food and drink … honor thy father and mother,” Yakov was saying with vexation, “but she, this daughter-in-law, has driven her father-in-law out of his ownest house. The old man’s got nothing to eat, nothing to drink—where’s he to go? It’s the third day he hasn’t eaten.”
“The third day!” Crutch said in surprise.
“He just sits like that, saying nothing. He’s grown weak. And why say nothing? If he goes to court, the court’s not going to praise her for it.”
“What’s the court going to praise?” asked Crutch, who had not heard well.
“Eh?”
“She’s an all-right woman, works hard. In that business you can’t get by without it … sin, I mean …”
“From his ownest house,” Yakov went on in vexation. “Earn yourself a house, then drive people out. Eh, she’s a fine one, she is! A pla-a-ague!”
Tsybukin listened without stirring.
“Your own house or somebody else’s, it makes no difference, so long as it’s warm and the women don’t yell at you …” said Crutch, and he laughed. “When I was still a young man, I pitied my Nastasya very much. She was a quiet little woman. She used to say: ‘Buy a house, Makarych! Buy a house, Makarych! And buy a horse, Makarych!’ She was dying, and she kept saying: ‘Buy yourself a droshky, Makarych, so as not to go on foot.’ But I only ever bought her gingerbread.”
“Her husband’s deaf and stupid,” Yakov went on, not listening to Crutch, “a fool of fools, the same as a goose. Does he understand anything? Hit a goose on the head with a stick—it still won’t understand.”
Crutch got up to go home to the factory. Yakov also got up, and the two went off together, still talking. When they were fifty paces away, old Tsybukin also got up and trudged after them, stepping uncertainly, as if on slippery ice.
The village was already sunk in evening twilight, and the sun shone only up above, on the road that ran snakelike down the slope. The old women were coming back from the forest, and the children with them; they were carrying baskets of mushrooms. Women and girls were coming in a crowd from the station, where they had been loading bricks on the cars, and their noses and cheeks under their eyes were covered with red brick dust. They were singing. Ahead of them all went Lipa, and she sang in a high voice, pouring out her song as she looked up at the
