Lipa stood in the doorway and looked as though she would say: “Do with me as you will, I trust you,” while her mother Praskovya, the workwoman, hid herself in the kitchen numb with shyness. At one time in her youth a merchant whose floors she was scrubbing stamped at her in a rage; she went chill with terror and there always was a feeling of fear at the bottom of her heart. When she was frightened her arms and legs trembled and her cheeks twitched. Sitting in the kitchen, she tried to hear what the visitors were saying, and she kept crossing herself, pressing her fingers to her forehead, and gazing at the icons. Anisim, slightly drunk, opened the door into the kitchen and said in a free-and-easy way:
“Why are you sitting in here, precious Mamma? We are dull without you.”
And Praskovya, overcome with timidity, pressing her hands to her lean, wasted bosom, said:
“Oh, not at all. . . . It’s very kind of you.”
After the visit of inspection the wedding day was fixed. Then Anisim walked about the rooms at home whistling, or, suddenly thinking of something, would fall to brooding and would look at the floor fixedly, silently, as though he would probe to the depths of the earth. He expressed neither pleasure that he was to be married, married so soon, on Low Sunday, nor a desire to see his bride, but simply went on whistling. And it was evident he was only getting married because his father and stepmother wished him to, and because it was the custom in the village to marry the son in order to have a woman to help in the house. When he went away he seemed in no haste, and behaved altogether not as he had done on previous visits—was particularly free and easy, and talked inappropriately.
3.
In the village Shikalovo lived two dressmakers, sisters, belonging to the Flagellant sect. The new clothes for the wedding were ordered from them, and they often came to try them on, and stayed a long while drinking tea. They were making Varvara a brown dress with black lace and bugles on it, and Aksinya a light green dress with a yellow front, with a train. When the dressmakers had finished their work Tsybukin paid them not in money but in goods from the shop, and they went away depressed, carrying parcels of tallow candles and tins of sardines which they did not in the least need, and when they got out of the village into the open country they sat down on a hillock and cried.
Anisim arrived three days before the wedding, rigged out in new clothes from top to toe. He had dazzling India-rubber galoshes, and instead of a cravat wore a red cord with little balls on it, and over his shoulder he had hung an overcoat, also new, without putting his arms into the sleeves.
After crossing himself sedately before the icon, he greeted his father and gave him ten silver rubles and ten half rubles; to Varvara he gave as much, and to Aksinya twenty quarter rubles. The chief charm of the present lay in the fact that all the coins, as though carefully matched, were new and glittered in the sun. Trying to seem grave and sedate, he pursed up his face and puffed out his cheeks, and he smelled of spirits. Probably he had visited the refreshment bar at every station. And again there was a free-and-easiness about the man—something superfluous and out of place. Then Anisim had lunch and drank tea with the old man, and Varvara turned the new coins over in her hand and inquired about villagers who had gone to live in the town.
“They are all right, thank God, they get on quite well,” said Anisim. “Only something has happened to Ivan Yegorov: his old wife Sofya Nikiforovna is dead. From consumption. They ordered the memorial dinner for the peace of her soul at the confectioner’s at two and a half rubles a head. And there was real wine. Those who were peasants from our village—they paid two and a half rubles for them, too. They ate nothing, as though a peasant would understand sauce!”
“Two and a half,” said his father, shaking his head.
“Well, it’s not like the country there; you go into a restaurant to have a snack of something, you ask for one thing and another, others join till there is a party of us, one has a drink—and before you know where you are it is daylight and you’ve three or four rubles each to pay. And when one is with Samorodov he likes to have coffee with brandy in it after everything, and brandy is sixty kopecks for a little glass.”
“And he is making it all up,” said the old man enthusiastically; “he is making it all up, lying!”
“I am always with Samorodov now. It is Samorodov who writes my letters to you. He writes splendidly. And if I were to tell you, Mamma,” Anisim went on gaily, addressing Varvara, “the sort of fellow that Samorodov is, you would not believe me. We call him Muhtar, because he is black like an Armenian. I can see through him, I know all his affairs like the five fingers of my hand, and he feels that, and he always follows me about; we are regular inseparables. He seems not to like it in a way, but he can’t get on without me. Where I go he goes. I have a correct, trustworthy eye, Mamma. One sees a peasant selling a shirt in the market place. ‘Stay, that shirt’s stolen.’ And really it turns out it is so: the shirt was a stolen one.”
“What do you tell from?” asked Varvara.
“Not from anything, I have just an eye for it. I know nothing about the shirt, only for some reason I seem drawn to it: it’s stolen, and that’s all I can say. Among us detectives it’s come to their saying, ‘Oh, Anisim has gone to shoot snipe!’ That means looking for stolen goods. Yes. . . . Anybody can steal, but it is another thing to keep! The earth is wide, but there is nowhere to hide stolen goods.”
“In our village a ram and two ewes were carried off last week,” said Varvara, and she heaved a sigh, “and there is no one to try and find them. . . . Oh, tut, tut. . . .”
“Well, I might have a try. I don’t mind.”
The day of the wedding arrived. It was a cool but bright, cheerful April day. People were driving about Ukleyevo from early morning with pairs or teams of three horses decked with many-colored ribbons on their yokes and manes, with a jingle of bells. The rooks, disturbed by this activity, were cawing noisily in the willows, and the starlings sang their loudest unceasingly, as though rejoicing that there was a wedding at the Tsybukins’.
Indoors the tables were already covered with long fish, smoked hams, stuffed fowls, boxes of sprats, pickled savories of various sorts, and a number of bottles of vodka and wine; there was a smell of smoked sausage and of sour tinned lobster. Old Tsybukin walked about near the tables, tapping with his heels and sharpening the knives against each other. They kept calling Varvara and asking for things, and she was constantly, with a distracted face, running breathlessly into the kitchen, where the man cook from Kostukov’s and the woman cook from Khrymin Juniors’ had been at work since early morning. Aksinya, with her hair curled, in her stays without her dress on, in new creaky boots, flew about the yard like a whirlwind showing glimpses of her bare knees and bosom.
It was noisy, there was a sound of scolding and oaths; passersby stopped at the wide-open gates, and in everything there was a feeling that something extraordinary was happening.
“They have gone for the bride!”
The bells began jingling and died away far beyond the village. . . . Between two and three o’clock people ran up: again there was a jingling of bells: they were bringing the bride! The church was full, the candelabra were lighted, the choir was singing from music books as old Tsybukin had wished it. The glare of the lights and the bright colored dresses dazzled Lipa; she felt as though the singers with their loud voices were hitting her on the head with a hammer. Her boots and the stays, which she had put on for the first time in her life, pinched her, and her face looked as though she had only just come to herself after fainting; she gazed about without understanding. Anisim, in his black coat with a red cord instead of a tie, stared at the same spot lost in thought, and when the singers shouted loudly he hurriedly crossed himself. He felt touched and disposed to weep. This church was familiar to him from earliest childhood; at one time his dead mother used to bring him here to take the sacrament; at one time he used to sing in the choir; every icon he remembered so well, every corner. Here he was being married; he had to take a wife for the sake of doing the proper thing, but he was not thinking of that now, he had forgotten his wedding completely. Tears dimmed his eyes so that he could not see the icons, he felt heavy at heart; he prayed and besought God that the misfortunes that threatened him, that were ready to burst upon him tomorrow, if not today, might somehow pass him by as storm clouds in time of drought pass over the village without yielding one drop of rain. And so many sins were heaped up in the past, so many sins, all getting away from them or setting them right was so beyond hope that it seemed incongruous even to ask forgiveness. But he did ask forgiveness, and even gave a loud sob, but no one took any notice of that, since they all supposed he had had a drop too much.