Beside him, crumpling his hat in his hands, stood the widow Cheprakov’s hired man Moisei, a fellow of about twenty-five, skinny, slightly pockmarked, with insolent little eyes; one of his cheeks was slightly bigger than the other, as if he had slept on it.
‘‘You bought it without the furniture, if you please, Your Honor,’’ he said hesitantly. ‘‘I remember it, sir.’’
‘‘Silence!’’ the engineer shouted, turned purple, shook, and the echo in the garden loudly repeated his shout.
XII
WHENEVER I WAS doing something in the garden or the yard, Moisei stood nearby and, with his hands behind his back, watched me lazily and insolently with his little eyes. And this annoyed me so much that I would abandon my work and leave.
We learned from Stepan that this Moisei was the widow’s lover. I noticed that when people came to her for money, they first addressed themselves to Moisei, and once I saw a muzhik, all black, probably a coal shoveler, bow down at his feet; sometimes, after some whispering, he handed the money over himself, without telling the lady, from which I concluded that on occasion he operated independently, on his own account.
He went shooting in the garden under our windows, pilfered food from our cellar, took the horses without asking, and we became indignant, ceasing to believe that Dubechnya was ours, and Masha would say, turning pale:
‘‘Do we really have to live with these vermin for another year and a half?’
The widow’s son, Ivan Cheprakov, served as a conductor on our railway. Over the winter he had grown very thin and weak, so that one glass made him drunk, and he felt cold in the shade. He wore conductor’s dress with disgust and was ashamed of it, but he considered his post profitable because he could steal candles and sell them. My new position aroused in him mixed feelings of astonishment, envy, and the vague hope that something similar might happen to him. He followed Masha with admiring eyes, asked what I now ate for dinner, and a sad and sweet expression appeared on his emaciated, homely face, and he moved his fingers as if touching my happiness.
‘‘Listen, Small Profit,’’ he said fussily, relighting his cigarette every moment; the place where he stood was always littered, because he used dozens of matches to light one cigarette. ‘‘Listen, my life now is the meanest sort. The main thing is that every little officer can shout: ‘Hey, you, conductor!’ I’ve heard a lot on the train, brother, all sorts of things, and you know, I realized: what a rotten life! My mother ruined me! A doctor on the train told me: if the parents are depraved, the children come out drunkards or criminals. That’s how it is!’’
Once he came into the yard reeling. His eyes wandered senselessly, he was breathing heavily; he laughed, cried, said something as if in feverish delirium, and all I could make out in his confused talk were the words: ‘‘My mother! Where’s my mother?’’ which he pronounced tearfully, like a child that has lost its mother in a crowd. I took him to our orchard and lay him down under a tree, and then all day and all night Masha and I took turns sitting by him. He was in poor shape, and Masha looked at his pale wet face with loathing, saying:
‘‘Will these vermin really be living in our yard for another year and a half? It’s terrible! Terrible!’’
And how much grief the peasants caused us! How many painful disappointments at the very first, in the spring months, when we so wanted to be happy! My wife was building a school. I drew the plan of a school for sixty boys, and the zemstvo17 council approved of it but advised building the school in Kurilovka, a big village that was only two miles from us; incidentally, the Kurilovka school, in which the children of four villages studied, including those from our Dubechnya, was old and small, and one had to walk warily on its rotted floor. At the end of March, Masha, at her own wish, was appointed trustee of the Kurilovka school, and at the beginning of April, we called meetings three times and tried to persuade the peasants that their school was small and old and that it was necessary to build a new one. A member of the zemstvo council came, and an inspector from the state school system, and also tried to persuade them. After each meeting, they surrounded us and asked for a bucket of vodka; it was hot in the crowd, we soon grew weary and returned home displeased and somewhat abashed. In the end, the peasants allotted a piece of land for the school and took it upon themselves to deliver all the building materials from town with their horses. And as soon as they were finished with the spring crops, on the very first Sunday, carts went from Kurilovka and Dubechnya to bring bricks for the foundation. They left at first light and came back late in the evening; the muzhiks were drunk and said they were exhausted.
As if on purpose, the rain and cold continued all through May. The road was ruined, turned to mud. The carts usually stopped by our yard on their way from town—and what a horror that was! Now a horse appears in the gateway, big-bellied, its forelegs splayed; it curtsies before coming into the yard; a thirty-foot beam comes crawling in on a dray, wet, slimy-looking; beside it, wrapped up against the rain, not looking under his feet, not avoiding the puddles, strides a muzhik, his coat skirts tucked up under his belt. Another cart appears with planks, then a third with a beam, a fourth... and the space in front of the house gradually becomes crammed with horses, beams, boards. Muzhiks and women with wrapped heads and tucked-up skirts look angrily at our windows, noisily demand that the lady come out to them; coarse abuse can be heard. And Moisei stands to one side, and it seems to us that he delights in our disgrace.
‘‘We won’t do any more carting!’’ shout the muzhiks. ‘‘We’re exhausted! Go and do your own carting!’’
Masha, pale, distraught, thinking they were about to break into our house, gives them money for a half-bucket of vodka, after which the noise subsides, and the long beams crawl out of the yard one after another.
When I got ready to go to the construction site, my wife became worried and said:
‘‘The peasants are angry. They might do something to you. No, wait, I’ll go with you.’’
We drove off to Kurilovka together, and there the carpenters asked us for a tip. The frame was ready, it was time to lay the foundation, but the masons did not come; there was a delay, and the carpenters murmured. But when the masons finally came, it turned out that there was no sand: the need for it had somehow been overlooked. Taking advantage of our helpless position, the peasants asked thirty kopecks per cartload, though it was less than a quarter of a mile from the construction site to the river, where they took the sand, and all told, we needed five hundred cartloads. There was no end of misunderstanding, abuse, and extortion, my wife was indignant, and Titus Petrov, the masonry contractor, a seventy-year-old man, took her by the hand and said:
‘‘Look here! Look here! Just get me the sand, and I’ll round you up ten men at once, and in two days it’ll be ready. Look here!’’
But the sand was delivered, two days, four days, a week went by, and a pit still yawned in the place of the future foundation.
‘‘It could drive you crazy!’’ My wife was agitated. ‘‘What people! What people!’’
During these disorders, the engineer Viktor Ivanych used to visit us. He would bring bags of wine and delicacies, spend a long time eating, and then fall asleep on the terrace and snore so loudly that the workers shook their heads and said:
