He sat on the step soaping his long hair and neck, wlile the water round him turned brown.
'Yes, I see what you mean,' said Ivan Ivanovich with a meaning look at his head.
'I haven't washed for ages,' repeated Alyo^m awkwardly. He soaped himself.again and the water round him turned inky.
Ivan Ivanovich came out, plunged in with a loud splash, swam about in the rain with broad sweeps of his arms and sent up waves with white water-lilies to^bg on them. He swam to the middle of the reach and dived. A little later he appeared somewhere ^^ md swam on further. He kept plunging and trying to touch bottom.
'By ^^ is terrific!' he kept repeating. He w:u enjoying
hi^^lf.
He sw.am up to the mill, spoke to the villagers there, then t^rad md floated on his back in the middle of the reach, ex^^ing his face to the rain. Burkin and Alyokhin were dr^^d and ready to leave, but still he swam and dived.
'Ye G^fe!' said he. 'Mercy on us!'
'That's enough,' shouted Burkin.
They went back to the ho^. The lamp was alight in the luge drawing-room upsuin. Burkin and lvan Ivmovich, in silk dr^ing- gowns and warm slippers, sat in easy chain, while Squire Alyo^m —wa.shed, combed, wearing a new frock-coat—paced up md down. obviously revelling in the warmth, cleanliness, dry clothing and light footwear. Soundlesly treading the carpet and softly smi^^, the fair Pelageya served tea and jam on a tray. And only now did Ivan Ivano- vich embark on his story. His audience semed to include not only Burkin and Alyo^^, but also the ladies, young and old, md the officen who looked out calmly md severely from the gilt frames on the walls.
There are two of us brothers (he began): myself, Ivan, md Nicholas —two my junior. I studied to be a vet, while Ni^oclass="underline" u had a l^^l gove^rnent job from the age of nineteen. Our father had ^^ a ranker, and after getting his commison he had ^^ueathed us the sutus ofgentleman together with a small estate whi^ was sequestrated after his death to pay his debts. Anyway, we lived a life in the open air as boys. We spent our days md nights in fields and like
ordi:ru.ry village children, minding horses, stripping bark, ^^ng: that kind of thing.
Now, as you know, once you'vĉ ever hooked a ruff^r ^ot migrat- ing thrushes swarm over your village on clear, cold autu^^ days— you'll never ^^e a to^^man after that, you'll yoarn for those wide open spaces till your dying day. My brother was ^^rable at the office. Yean passed, but he suyed put: for ever copying the ume old docu- ments, for ever ob^^d with getting back to the land. Gradually vague longing crysullized into a specific desire: the dream of buying a nice little country estate beside a river or lake.
He was a gentle, kind man. I was fond of him, but never did I sympatluze with his wish to coop limself up for life in a country house. There's a saying that six foot of earth is all a man needs. A man? A corpse, more like! Now, if our professional people want to get back to the land, if they all have their eye on country properties, that's supposed to be a good thing these days. But those little places in the country . . . they're just that same old six foot of earth, really, aren't they? To leave the to^, the tumult and the shouting, to skulk in your little place in the country . . . that's no life, that isn't. It's selfishness, it's idleness, it's the monastic discipline—but without the hope of glory! Man needs no six foot of earth, he needs no little place in thc country. He needs the whole globe—all nature—so that he can develop, untrammelled, all his potentialities, all the attributes of his free spirit.
At the office brother Nicholas dreamed of eating stew made from his o^ cabbages and seemed to sniff their savour wafting through his yard. He dreamed of ta^^g his meals on green grass, of sleeping in the sun, of sitting on a bench outside his gate for hours on end gazing at fields and woods. Booklets on agriculture, calendar mottoes and such ... these were his joy, his favourite spiritual sustenance. He liked newspapers too, but only read advertisements about so many acres of arable land and meadow being up for sale with farmhouse, river, orchard, ^^ and mill-pond. His imagination pictured garden paths, flowers, fruit, nesting boxes for starlings, carp in ponds—you know the sort of stuff. These fancies varied with the advertisements which came his way, but for some reason the staple feature of them all was . .. the gooseberry. No manor house, no idyllic nook could he picture without that gooseberry patch.
'Country life does have its advantages,' he would say. 'You have tea on your balcony while your ducks swim on the pond. There's a wonder- ful smell and, er ... and there are these gooseberries!'
He would sketch a plan of his estate, a plan which always had the same features: (a) ^^or house; (b) servants' quarters; (c) kitchen- garden; (d) gooseberries. He lived miserably. He went short of food and he dressed any old how—like a tramp—and he kept saving money and putting it in the bank. He was a fearful miser. It pained me to see him, and I used to give him one or two things—send them on special occasions. But those things too he used to put away. Once a man's obsessed by an idea there's no^mg you ^^ do about it.
The years paM, he is transferred to a diferent county, he is now in his forties, but he is still reading those newspaper advertisements and saving money. Then I hear he's got married. Still aiming to buy that estate with the gooseberry patch, he has married an ugly old widow for whom he has no feelings-just because she's well-heeled. He leads her a miserable life too, keeping her half starved and putting her money in his own bank account. Before that she has been a post- master's wife, and as such she's been used to cakes and home-made wines, but with her second husband she even goes short ofblack bread. This roitine sends her into a decline, and three years later she duly gives up the ghost! Not, of course, that my brother for one moment fcels responsible for her death. Money's like strong drink, it makes a man act strangely. There was once a merchant of our town, a dying man, who ordered a bowl of honey on his death-bed, mixed in his banknotes and his lottery tickets . .. and swallowed the lot, to stop anyone else getting it. Once, when I was inspecting beasts at a railway station, a catde-dealer was run over by a train. It takes his leg off. We get him to a casualty department, there's blood everywhere: a horrible business! But he keeps begging us to look for that leg—can't stop worrying about the twenty roubles he has in the severed boot, thinks he may lose them.
'That's a bit beside the point,' said Burkin.
After his wife's death (Ivan Ivanovich went on after half a minute's thought) my brother began looking for a country property. Now, of course, you can spend five years hunting and still make the wrong choice, still end up with something quite unlike your dream house. Through an estate agent brother Nicholas bought three hundred acres on a mortgage. There was a manor house, there were servants' quarters, there was a park. But there was no orchard, there were no gooseberries and there were no duck-ponds. He did have a river, but the water was coffee-coloured because of a brickyard on one side of the estate and a bone-ash works on the other. Still, good old Nicholas didn't much care. He ordered twenty gooseberry-bushes, he planted them, and he set up as a squire.
I looked him up last year, thought I'd go and see what he was up to. In his letters my brother called his estate 'Chumbaroklov Patch' or 'Gimalaysky's', and one afternoon I tum up at this 'Gimalaysky's'. It's hot. There are ditches, fences, hedges, rows of little firs aU over the place, and there doesn't seem to be any way into the yard or any place to leave your horse. As I approach the house I am met by a fat, gingcr- coloured dog which resembles a pig and would like to bark but can't be bothered. From the kitchen emerges a cook—barefoot, fat, also resembling a pig—and says that the master is having his after-lunch nap. I entcr my brother's room, and there he is sitting up in bed with a blanket over lus lap. He has aged, he has put on weight, he looks positively frowsty. His nosc, lips and cheeks jut forward. Hc seems all set to grunt into his- blanket.