After walking two miles with them, Marya said good-bye, then kneeling, and falling forward with her face on the earth, she began wailing:
“Again I am left alone. Alas, for poor me! Poor, unhappy! . . .”
And she wailed like this for a long time, and for a long way Olga and Sasha could still see her on her knees, bowing down to someone at the side and clutching her head in her hands, while the rooks flew over her head.
The sun rose high; it began to get hot. Zhukovo was left far behind. Walking was pleasant. Olga and Sasha soon forgot both the village and Marya; they were gay and everything entertained them. Now they came upon an ancient barrow, now upon a row of telegraph posts running one after another into the distance and disappearing into the horizon, and the wires hummed mysteriously. Then they saw a homestead, all wreathed in green foliage; there came a scent from it of dampness, of hemp, and it seemed for some reason that happy people lived there. Then they came upon a horse’s skeleton whitening in solitude in the open fields. And the larks trilled unceasingly, the corn crakes called to one another, and the land rail cried as though someone were really scraping at an old iron rail.
At midday Olga and Sasha reached a big village. There in the broad street they met the little old man who was General Zhukov’s cook. He was hot, and his red, perspiring bald head shone in the sunshine. Olga and he did not recognize each other, then looked round at the same moment, recognized each other, and went their separate ways without saying a word. Stopping near the hut which looked newest and most prosperous, Olga bowed down before the open windows, and said in a loud, thin, chanting voice:
“Good Christian folk, give alms, for Christ’s sake, that God’s blessing may be upon you, and that your parents may be in the Kingdom of Heaven in peace eternal.”
“Good Christian folk,” Sasha began chanting, “give, for Christ’s sake, that God’s blessing, the Heavenly Kingdom . . .”
Two further chapters of Peasants were found among Chekhov’s papers and have been published in Volume 9 of the Soviet edition of his works. He had evidently, as the Soviet editors say, “planned to present, side by side with the rural peasant life, the life of the ‘superfluous’ peasant population under metropolitan conditions.” That this was a part of his original intention and not an afterthought for a sequel is shown by the fact that his notes for it are found, in his notebooks, mixed in with his notes for the earlier parts of the story. Those entries that relate to the incidents which were to follow these two later chapters (from Volume 12 of the Soviet edition) have been made to follow them here.
It should also be mentioned that, in deference to the censor, a whole chapter from the story as written was omitted and has never been found. This contained, as Chekhov explains in a letter to F. D. Batyushkov of January 24, 1900, “a peasants’ conversation about religion and the authorities.”
10.
Olga’s sister-in-law, Klavdia Abramovna, lived in one of the little alleys near the Patriarch’s Ponds, [1] in an ancient two-storied house. On the bottom floor was a laundry, and the whole of the upper floor was rented by an elderly gentlewoman, a quiet retiring old maid, who in turn rented rooms to lodgers and supported herself in this way. Coming into the dark hallway, you found yourself facing two doors, one on the right and one on the left: behind the first of these, in a little room, lived Klavdia Abramovna and Sasha; behind the other lived a printer’s make-up man. Beyond was a parlor, with a divan, armchairs, a lamp with a shade, and pictures on the walls —everything quite as it should be; but there was a smell there of steam and the washing of clothes that penetrated from the laundry below, and all day the sound of singing was heard. This parlor, which was used by all the lodgers, gave access to three apartments; in one of these the landlady lived, in another an aged lackey, Ivan Makarich Matvyeichev, a native of Zhukovo, the man who had once put Nikolai in the way of finding a job; on his door, which was white and was always kept closed, hung a big stable lock on a chain; on the other side of the third door lived a scrawny young woman, with sharp eyes and thick lips, who had three children that were always crying. On holidays a monastery priest came to see her. She usually went about all day wearing nothing but a skirt, without washing herself or doing her hair, but on the days when she was expecting her monastery priest, she would put on a silk dress and curl her hair.
In Klavdia Abramovna’s room there was, as they say, not the space to turn around. There were a bed, a chest of drawers, a chair, and that was all—and yet it was somehow crowded. But the little room was tidily kept, and Klavdia Abramovna called it her boudoir. She was very much pleased with her furniture—especially with the things on the chest of drawers: a mirror, lip salve and powder, little bottles and little boxes, ceruse, [2] and every kind of luxury that she regarded as essential to her profession and on which she spent most of her earnings; and there were photographs in little frames that showed her in various guises. She had been taken with her husband, a postman, with whom she had lived only a year, after which she had left him, not feeling a vocation for family life. She had been photographed, as is common with women of that sort, with a bang on her forehead and frizzed like a sheep; in the uniform of a soldier, flourishing an unsheathed saber; and dressed as a page, astride a chair, so that her thighs, clad in tights, lay flat on the chair, like two fat boiled sausages. There were portraits of men, also—she was in the habit of calling them her visitors and did not always know their names; our friend Kiryak was even among them in his quality of family connection: he had had a full-length photograph taken of himself, wearing a pair of black trousers that he had somewhere or other acquired for a time.
Formerly Klavdia Abramovna had frequented costume balls and Filippov’s [3] and spent whole evenings on the Tversky Boulevard; but with the years she had come gradually to stay at home, and now that she had reached forty-two, she rarely received visitors, and these were only a few left over from her earlier years, who came to her in memory of old times, and alas! had grown old themselves and visited her even more seldom, since they were dropping off every year. Among her new visitors there was only one who was very young, still beardless; he would come into the entrance hall, like a conspirator, noiselessly and sullenly, with the collar of his schoolboy coat pulled up around his ears in an attempt not to be seen from the parlor, and afterwards, when he went away, he would leave a ruble on the chest of drawers.
For whole days now Klavdia Abramovna would sit at home doing nothing; occasionally, however, when the weather was fine, she would walk along the Tverskaya or the Little Bronnaya, holding her head up proudly and feeling herself a lady of solid position and dignity, and only when she dropped in at a druggist’s, to inquire in a whisper about ointment to get rid of red hands or wrinkles, did she show any sense of shame. In the evening, not lighting the light, she would sit in her little room and wait for someone to come; and about eleven o’clock—this now occurred only infrequently, once or twice a week—somebody would be heard walking softly, groping up and down the stairs, and then rustling behind the door, in an effort to find the bell. The door would then open, a muttering would be heard, and the visitor with hesitation would come into the entrance hall—he would usually be bald and obese, old and unattractive—and Klavdia Abramovna would hasten to bring him into her little room. She adored a “respectable visitor.” There was for her no higher or worthier being; to receive a respectable visitor, to conduct herself toward him with delicacy, to do him honor, to satisfy him, was her soul’s need, her duty, her happiness, her pride; to refuse such a visitor, to treat him in an inhospitable manner was something of which she was quite incapable, even in the period of fasting in preparation for her Easter devotions.