Through Russia

"Oh, so you are NOT asleep?" he countered with a nod of his melon-shaped cranium. "As a matter of fact, a few apples won't be missed, for there are too many of them about. My own father it was that planted the trees which have grown them."

Then, turning upon me a keen, good-humoured eye, and chuckling, he added:

"What about that Nadezhda? Ah, she is a clever woman indeed! Yet I have a surprise in store for her and her lover."

"Why should you have?"

"Because I desire to benefit mankind at large" (this was said didactically, and with a frown). "For, no matter where I detect evil or underhandedness, it is my duty – I feel it to be my duty – to expose that evil, and to lay it bare. There exist people who need to be taught a lesson, and to whom I long to cry: 'Sinners that you are, do you lead more righteous lives!'"

From behind some clouds the sun was rising with a disk as murky and mournful as the face of an ailing child. It was as though he were feeling conscious that he had done amiss in so long delaying to shed light upon the world, in so long dallying on his bed of soft clouds amid the smoke of the forest fire. But gradually the cheering beams suffused the garden throughout, and evoked from the ripening fruit an intoxicating wave of scent in which there could be distinguished also the bracing breath of autumn.

Simultaneously there rose into the sky, in the wake of the sun, a dense stratum of cloud which, blue and snow-white in colour, lay with its soft hummocks reflected in the calm Oka, and so wrought therein a secondary firmament as profound and impalpable as its original.

"Now then, Makar!" was Gubin's command, and once more I posted myself at the bottom of the well. About three sazheni in depth, and lined with cold, damp mud to above the level of my middle, the orifice was charged with a stifling odour both of rotten wood and of something more intolerable still. Also, whenever I had filled the pail with mud, and then emptied it into the bucket and shouted "Right away!" the bucket would start swinging against my person and bumping it, as unwillingly it went aloft, and thereafter discharge upon my head and shoulders clots of filth and drippings of water – meanwhile screening, with its circular bottom, the glowing sun and now scarce visible stars. In passing, the spectacle of those stars' waning both pained and cheered me, for it meant that for a companion in the firmament they now had the sun. Hence it was until my neck felt almost fractured, and my spine and the nape of my neck were aching as though clamped in a cast of plaster of paris, that I kept my eyes turned aloft. Yes, anything to gain a sight of the stars! From them I could not remove my vision, for they seemed to exhibit the heavens in a new guise, and to convey to me the joyful tidings that in the sky there was present also the sun.

Yet though, meanwhile, I tried to ponder on something great, I never failed to find myself cherishing the absurd, obstinate apprehension that soon the Birkins would leave their beds, enter the courtyard, and have Nadezhda betrayed to them by Gubin.

And throughout there kept descending to me from above the latter's inarticulate, as it were damp-sodden, observations.

"Another rat!" I heard him exclaim. "To think that those two fellows, men of money, should neglect for two whole years to clean out their well! Why, what can the brutes have been drinking meanwhile? Look out below, you!"

And once more, with a creaking of the pulley, the bucket would descend – bumping and thudding against the lining of the well as it did so, and bespattering afresh my head and shoulders with its filth. Rightly speaking, the Birkins ought to have cleared out the well themselves!

"Let us exchange places," I cried at length.

"What is wrong?" inquired Gubin in response

"Down here it is cold – I can't stand it any longer."

"Gee up!" exclaimed Gubin to the old horse which supplied the leverage power for the bucket; whereupon I seated myself upon the edge of the receptacle and went aloft, where everything was looking so bright and warm as to bear a new and unwontedly pleasing appearance.

So now it was Gubin's turn to stand at the bottom of the well. And soon, in addition to the odour of decay, and a subdued sound of splashing, and the rumblings and bumpings of the iron bucket against its chain, there began to come up from the damp, black cavity a perfect stream of curses.

"The infernal skinflints!" I heard my companion exclaim.

"Hullo, here is something! A dog or a baby, eh? The damned old barbarians!"

And the bucket ascended with, among its contents, a sodden and most ancient hat. With the passage of time Gubin's temper grew worse and worse.

"If I SHOULD find a baby here," next he exclaimed, "I shall report the matter to the police, and get those blessed old brothers into trouble."

Each movement of the leathern-hided, wall-eyed steed which did our bidding was accompanied by a swishing of a sandy tail which had for its object the brushing away of autumn's harbingers, the bluebottles. Almost with the tranquil gait of a religious did the animal accomplish its periodical journeys from the wall to the entrance gates and back again; after which it always heaved a profound sigh, and stood with its bony crest lowered.

Presently, from a corner of the yard that lay screened behind some rank, pale, withered, trampled herbage a door screeched. Into the yard there issued Nadezhda Birkin, carrying a bunch of keys, and followed by a lady who, elderly and rotund of figure, had a few dark hairs growing on her full and rather haughty upper lip. As the two walked towards the cellar (Nadezhda being clad only in an under-petticoat, with a chemise half-covering her shoulders, and slippers thrust on to bare feet), I perceived from the languor of the younger woman's gait that she was feeling weary indeed.

"Why do you look at us like that?" her senior inquired of me as she drew level. And as she did so the eyes that peered at me from above the full and, somehow, displaced-looking cheeks bid in them a dim, misty, half-blind expression.

"That must be Peter Birkin's mother-in-law," was my unspoken reflection.

At the door of the cellar Nadezhda handed the keys to her companion, and with a slow step which set her ample bosom swaying, and increased the disarray of the bodice on her round, but broad, shoulders, approached myself, and said quietly:

"Please open the gutter-sluice and let out the water into the street, or the yard will soon be flooded. Oh, the smell of it! What is that thing there? A rat? Oh batinshka, what a horrible mess!"

Her face had about it a drawn look, and under her eyes there were a pair of dark patches, and in their depths the dry glitter of a person who has spent a night of waking. True, it was a face still fresh of hue; yet beads of sweat were standing on the forehead, and her shoulders looked grey and heavy – as grey and heavy as unleavened bread which the fire has coated with a thin crust, yet failed to bake throughout.

"Please, also, open the wicket," she continued. "And, in case a lame old beggar-woman should call, come and tell me. I am the Nadezhda Ivanovna for whom she will inquire. Do you understand?"

From the well, at this point, there issued the words:

"Who is that speaking?"

"It is the mistress," I replied.

"What? Nadezhda? With her I have a bone to pick."

"What did he say?" the woman asked tensely as she raised her dark, thinly pencilled brows, and made as though to go and lean over the well. Independently of my own volition I forestalled what Gubin might next have been going to say by remarking:

"I must tell you that last night he saw you walking in the garden here."

"Indeed?" she ejaculated, and drew herself to her full height. Yet in doing so she blushed to her shoulders, and, clapping plump hands to her bosom, and opening dark eyes to their fullest, said in a hasty and confused whisper as, again paling and shrinking in stature, she subsided like a piece of pastry that is turning heavy:

"Good Lord! WHAT did he see?.. If the lame woman should call, you must not admit her. No, tell her that she will not be wanted, that I cannot, that I must not – But see here. Here is a rouble for you. Oh, good Lord!"

By this time even louder and more angry exclamations had begun to ascend from Gubin. Yet the only sound to reach my ears was the woman's muttered whispering, and as I glanced into her face I perceived that its hitherto high-coloured and rounded contours had fallen in, and turned grey, and that her flushed lips were trembling to such an extent as almost to prevent the articulation of her words. Lastly, her eyes were frozen into an expression of pitiful, doglike terror.

Suddenly she shrugged her shoulders, straightened her form, put away from her the expression of terror, and said quietly, but incisively:

"You will not need to say anything about this. Allow me."

And with a swaying step she departed – a step so short as almost to convey the impression that her legs were bound together. Yet while the gait was the gait of a person full of suppressed fury, it was also the gait of a person who can scarcely see an inch in advance.

"Haul away, you!" shouted Gubin.

I hauled him up in a state of cold and wet; whereafter he fell to stamping around the coping of the well, cursing, and waving his arms.

"What have you been thinking of all this time?" he vociferated. "Why, for ever so long I shouted and shouted to you!"

"I have been telling Nadezhda that last night you saw her walking in the garden."

He sprang towards me with a vicious scowl.

"Who gave you leave to do so?" he exclaimed.

"Wait a moment. I said that it was only in a dream, that you saw her crossing the garden to the washhouse."

"Indeed? And why did you do that?"

Somehow, as, barelegged and dripping with mud, he stood blinking his eyes at me with a most disagreeable expression, he looked extremely comical.