On one June evening, when the sun was setting and the air smelled of hay, warm manure, and fresh milk, a simple cart drove into Dyudya’s yard carrying three people: a man of about thirty in a cotton suit, beside him a seven- or eight-year-old boy in a long black frock coat with big bone buttons, and a young fellow in a red shirt as driver.
The fellow unharnessed the horses and went to walk them up and down in the street, and the traveler washed, prayed facing the church, then spread out a rug by the cart and sat down with the boy to have supper; he ate unhurriedly, gravely, and Dyudya, who had seen many travelers in his day, recognized him by his manners as a practical and serious man who knew his own worth.
Dyudya sat on the porch in his waistcoat, without a hat, and waited for the traveler to speak. He was used to travelers telling all sorts of stories in the evening before bed, and he liked it. His old wife Afanasyevna and his daughter-in-law Sofya were milking the cows in the shed; the other daughter-in-law, Varvara, was sitting at an open window upstairs eating sunflower seeds.
“The boy would be your son, then?” Dyudya asked the traveler.
“No, he’s adopted, an orphan. I took him in for the saving of my soul.”
They fell to talking. The traveler turned out to be a garrulous and eloquent man, and Dyudya learned from the conversation that he was a tradesman from town, a house-owner, that his name was Matvei Savvich, that he was now on his way to look at the orchards he rented from German colonists, and that the boy’s name was Kuzka. It was a hot and stuffy evening, and nobody felt like sleeping. When darkness came and pale stars twinkled here and there in the sky, Matvei Savvich began to tell where he got his Kuzka from. Afanasyevna and Sofya stood a little way off and listened. And Kuzka went to the gate.
“This, grandpa, is a detailed story in the extreme,” Matvei Savvich began, “and if I was to tell you everything as it was, the night wouldn’t be long enough. About ten years ago in our street, just next to my place, in a little house that’s now a candle factory and a creamery, there lived an old widow named Marfa Simonovna Kapluntsev, and she had two sons: one worked as a conductor for the railway, and the other, Vasya, the same age as me, lived with his mother. The late old man Kapluntsev kept horses, five pair, and sent carters around town; his widow kept up the business and ordered the carters about no worse than the deceased, so that some days she cleared up to five roubles in profit. And the boy, too, made a bit of money. He bred pedigree pigeons and sold them to fanciers; he used to spend all his time on the roof, throwing a broom up and whistling, and his tumbler pigeons would fly up into the sky, but it wasn’t high enough, he wanted them to fly still higher. He caught finches and starlings, made cages … A trifling thing, but the trifles would add up to ten roubles a month. Well, sir, after a while the old woman lost the use of her legs and took to her bed. Owing to that fact, the house was left without a mistress, and that’s the same as a man without an eye. The old woman stirred herself and decided to get her Vasya married. The matchmaker was sent for, this and that, women’s talk, and our Vasya went to look himself up a bride. He picked out the widow Samokhvalikha’s Mashenka. Without more ado the couple got blessed and the whole thing was put together in a week. The girl was young, about seventeen, short, scanty, but with a fair and pleasant face, and with all the qualities, like a young lady; and the dowry wasn’t bad either—five hundred roubles in cash, a cow, linen … And three days after the wedding, as if her heart could sense it, the old woman departed for the heavenly Jerusalem, where there’s no sickness or sighing.1 The young couple paid her their respects and began life together. They lived in splendid fashion for about half a year, then suddenly a new woe. Misfortunes never come singly: Vasya was summoned to the office to draw lots. They took him, the dear heart, as a soldier and didn’t even shorten his term. They shaved his head and drove him to the Kingdom of Poland. It was God’s will, nothing to be done. He was all right as he took leave of his wife in the yard, but when he gave a last look at the hayloft with his pigeons, he dissolved in floods of tears. It was a pity to see. At first, so as not to be bored, Mashenka took in her mother; the mother stayed till this Kuzka was born, then went to Oboyan to her other daughter, also married, and Mashenka was left alone with the baby. Five carters, all drunken folk, mischievous; horses, wagons, then a fence would collapse, or the soot would catch fire in the chimney—not a woman’s business, so she started turning to me, in neighborly fashion, for every trifle. Well, I’d come and take care of it, give her advice … You know, there was nothing for it but to go in, have some tea, talk a bit. I was a young man, of a mental sort, liked to talk about various subjects, and she was educated and polite, too. She dressed neatly, went about with a parasol in summer. I’d start on divinity or politics with her, and she’d be flattered and treat me to tea and preserves … In short, not to embroider on it, I’ll tell you, grandpa, that before a year was out the unclean spirit, the enemy of the human race, got me worked up. I began to notice that if I didn’t go to her one day, I’d feel out of sorts, bored. And I kept inventing some reason to go to her. ‘It’s time you put your winter sashes in,’ I’d say, and I’d spend the whole day loitering around her place, putting the sashes in and doing it so as there were two sashes left for the next day. ‘I must count up Vasya’s pigeons, to make sure none gets lost,’ and the like. I kept talking with her over the fence, and in the end, to save going the long way round, I made a little gate in it. There’s a lot of evil and all sorts of vileness in this world from the female sex. Not only us sinners but even holy men have been led astray. Mashenka didn’t do anything to turn me away from her. Instead of remembering her husband and minding herself, she fell in love with me. I began to notice that she was bored, too, and kept walking near the fence and looking into my yard through the cracks. The brains in my head whirled with fantasy. On Thursday in Holy Week,2 early, at daybreak, I went to the market, and as I passed her gate, the unclean one was right there. I looked—her gate had a little lattice at the top—and she was already up and standing in the middle of the yard feeding the ducks. I couldn’t help myself and called to her. She came up and looked at me through the lattice. Fair little face, tender eyes, still sleepy … I liked her very much and began paying her compliments, as if we weren’t by the gate but at a birthday party, and she blushed, laughed, and kept looking right into my eyes without blinking. I lost my mind and started explaining my amorous feelings to her … She opened the gate and let me in, and from that morning on we began to live as husband and wife.”
Hunchbacked Alyoshka came into the yard from outside and, breathless, not looking at anyone, ran into the house; a moment later he came running out with an accordion, the copper money jingling in his pocket, and disappeared through the gate, cracking sunflower seeds as he ran.
“And who’s that one?” asked Matvei Savvich.
“Our son, Alexei,” Dyudya answered. “Gone carousing, the scoundrel. God wronged him with a hump, so we don’t ask too much.”
“And he keeps on carousing, carousing with the boys,” Afanasyevna sighed. “We married him off before Lent, thinking he’d get better, but he got even worse.”