She hastily crossed me several times and said:
‘‘Well, God be with you, I wish you happiness. Anyuta Blagovo is a very intelligent girl, she says of your marriage that God is sending you a new test. What, then? In family life there are not only joys but also sufferings. It’s impossible without that.’’
Seeing her off, Masha and I went on foot about two miles; then, on the way back, we walked slowly and silently, as if resting. Masha held my hand, our hearts were light, and we no longer wanted to speak of love; after our marriage, we became still closer and dearer to each other, and it seemed to us that nothing could separate us now.
‘‘Your sister is a sympathetic being,’’ said Masha, ‘‘but it looks as though she’s been tormented for a long time. Your father must be a terrible man.’’
I began to tell her how my sister and I had been brought up and indeed how tormenting and senseless our childhood had been. Learning that my father had beaten me still so recently, she shuddered and pressed herself to me.
‘‘Don’t tell me any more,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s frightening.’’
Now she never parted from me. We lived in the big house, in three rooms, and in the evening tightly bolted the door leading to the empty part of the house, as if someone lived there whom we did not know and were afraid of. I got up early, at dawn, and straightaway started some work. I repaired the carts, laid out the paths in the garden, dug the flower beds, painted the roof of the house. When the time came for sowing oats, I tried my hand at cross- plowing, harrowing, sowing, and I did it all conscientiously, without lagging behind the hired man; I’d get tired from the rain, and the sharp, cold wind made my face and legs burn for a long time, and at night I dreamed of plowed earth. But working in the fields did not attract me. I didn’t know farming and didn’t like it; the reason for that might have been that my ancestors were not tillers of the soil, and pure city blood flowed in my veins. Nature I loved tenderly, I loved the fields and meadows, and the kitchen garden, but the muzhik turning over the soil with a wooden plow, bedraggled, wet, his neck stretched out, urging on his pitiful horse, was for me the expression of a crude, wild, ugly force, and each time I looked at his clumsy movements, I involuntarily began to think of that long- gone, legendary life before people knew the use of fire. The stern bull going about with the peasant’s herd, and the horses, when they raced through the village, their hooves pounding, inspired fear in me, and everything at all big, strong, and angry, whether it was a ram with horns, a gander, or a watchdog, was to me an expression of the same crude, wild force. This prejudice spoke in me especially strongly during bad weather, when heavy clouds hung over the black plowed fields. But above all, when I plowed or sowed, and two or three people stood and watched me do it, I had no consciousness that this labor was inevitable and obligatory, and it seemed to me that I was amusing myself. And I preferred to do something in the yard and liked nothing so much as painting the roof.
I used to go through the garden and through the meadow to our mill. It was leased to Stepan, a muzhik from Kurilovka, handsome, swarthy, with a thick black beard, a very strong man by the look of him. He didn’t like the work at the mill, and considered it boring and unprofitable, and he lived at the mill only so as not to live at home. He was a harness-maker, and there was always a pleasant smell of tar and leather about him. He didn’t like talking, was sluggish, inert, and kept crooning ‘‘Oo-loo-loo-loo’’ to himself as he sat on the riverbank or in the doorway. Occasionally his wife and mother-in-law would come to him from Kurilovka, both of them fair-skinned, languid, meek; they bowed low to him and addressed him formally as ‘‘Stepan Petrovich.’’ But he, not responding to their bows either by a gesture or by a word, sat apart on the riverbank and crooned softly ‘‘Ooloo-loo-loo.’’ An hour or two would pass in silence. Mother-in-law and wife would exchange whispers, get up, look at him for some time, waiting for him to turn and look at them, then bow low and say in sweet, singsong voices:
‘‘Good-bye, Stepan Petrovich!’’
And go away. After that, picking up a bundle of bread rolls or a shirt, Stepan would sigh and say, winking in their direction:
‘‘The female sex!’’
The mill, with its two sets of millstones, worked day and night. I helped Stepan, it was to my liking, and when he went off somewhere, I willingly stayed in his place.
XI
AFTER THE WARM, clear weather came mud time; it rained all through May, and it was cold. The noise of the mill wheels and the rain disposed one to laziness and sleepiness. The floor trembled, there was a smell of flour, and that also made one drowsy. My wife, in a short fur coat and high, man’s rubber boots, put in an appearance twice a day and always said one and the same thing:
‘‘And they call this summer! It’s worse than October!’’
Together we drank tea, cooked kasha, or sat silently for long hours waiting for the rain to stop. Once, when Stepan went off to a country fair somewhere, Masha spent the whole night at the mill. When we got up, it was impossible to tell what time it was, because the rain clouds covered the sky; only sleepy roosters crowed in Dubechnya, and corncrakes called in the meadow; it was still very, very early... My wife and I went down to the pool and pulled out the creel Stepan had set in our presence the day before. One big perch was struggling in it, and a bristling crayfish, his claw thrust up.
‘‘Let them out,’’ said Masha. ‘‘Let them be happy, too.’’
Because we got up very early and then did nothing, this day seemed very long, the longest in my life. Before evening Stepan came back, and I went home to the farmhouse.
‘‘Your father came today,’’ Masha told me.
‘‘Where is he?’’ I asked.
‘‘He left. I didn’t receive him.’’
Seeing that I stood there and said nothing, that I felt sorry for my father, she said:
‘‘One must be consistent. I didn’t receive him and sent word to him that he needn’t trouble himself anymore by coming to see us.’’
A minute later, I was out the gate and on my way to town to talk things over with my father. It was muddy, slippery, cold. For the first time since the wedding, I felt sad, and in my brain, weary from this long, gray day, the thought flashed that maybe I wasn’t living as I should. I was worn out, I gradually succumbed to faintheartedness, laziness, I didn’t want to move, to think, and, having gone a little way, I waved my hand and turned back.
In the middle of the yard stood the engineer in a leather coat with a hood, speaking loudly:
‘‘Where’s the furniture? There was fine furniture in the Empire style, there were paintings, there were vases, and now you could play skittles in it! I bought the estate with the furniture, devil take it!’’
