Anyway, winter did end. In early April the days were warm, with night frosts. Winter still held out, but one day the warmth won through at last. Streams flowed and birds sang. The whoIe meadow and the bushes near the river were submerged in spring floods and between Zhukovo and the far bank there was one vast sheet of water with flocks of wild duck taking wing here and there. Every evening the blazing spring sunset and gorgeous clouds presented a new, un- believable, extraordinary sight—the sort of colours and clouds that you just cannot believe if you see them in a picture.
Cranes sped past overhead, calling plaintively as if asking someone to join them. Standing on the edge of the cliff, Olga gazed for some time at the floods, the sun and the bright church which Iooked like new. Her tears flowed and she caught her breath, feeling a wild urge to go away somewhere into the blue, even to the ends of the earth. It had been settled that she was to go back to Moscow as a house-maid, and Kiryak was to go with her to take a hall-porter's job or some- thing. If they could only go soon!
When it was dry and warm they prepared to leave. With packs on their backs, both wearing bark shoes, Olga and Sasha left the hut at daybreak. Marya came out to see them off-—Kiryak was ill and was staying at home for another week.
Olga looked at the church for the last time and said a prayer, thinking of her husband. She did not cry, but her face puckered up and looked as ugly as an old womai's. She had grown thin and plain and a little grey that winter and her bcrcavcmem had given hcr face a resigned, sad expression in place of her former attractive looks and pleasant smile. There was something blank and torpid about hcr glance, as if she was deaf. She was sorry to leave the village and the villagers. She remembered them carrying Nicholas's body and asking for a prayer to be said fof him at each hut, everyone wecping in sympathy with her grief.
During the sununer and winter there had been hours and days when these people seemed to live worse than beasts. They were frightful people to live with—rough, dishonest, filthy, drunken. Holding each other in mutual disrespect, fear and suspicion, they were always at loggerheads, always squabbling.
Who keeps the pot-house and makes the peasant drwtic ? The peasant. Who squanders his vilage, school and church funds on drink? The peasant. Who steals from his neighbours, sets fire to their property and perjures himself in court for a bottle of vodka? Who is the first to run down the peasant at council and other meetings? The peasant.
Yes, they were frighrful people to live with. Still, they were men and women, they suffered and wept like men and women, and there was nothing in their lives for which an excuse could not be found— back-breaking work that makes you ache al over at night, cruel winters, poor harvests and overcrowding, with no help and nowhere to turn for it. The richer and stronger ones are no help, for they are rough, dishonest and drunken themselves and use the same filthy language. The pettiest official or clerk treats the peasants like tramps, even talking downwn to elders and churchwardens as if by right. Anyway, what help or good example can you expect from grasping, greedy, depraved, lazy persons who come to the vilage only to insult, rob and intimidate? Olga remembered how pitiful and crushed the old people had looked at the time when Kiryak had ben taken off to be flogged that winter.
She now felt sick with pity for all these people and kept turning back to look at the huts.
Marya went with her for about two miles, then said goodbye, knelt down and began wailing, pressing her face to the ground.
'I'm on my again. Poor me, poor lonely, unhappy me ... !'
For a long time she moaned like this. And for a long ^rne Olga and Sasha saw her kneeling and bowing as ifto someone at her side, clutch- ing her head while rooks flew above.
The sun rose high and it grew hot. Zhukovo was far behind. It was a nice day for walking and Olga and Sasha soon forgot both village and Marya. They felt cheerful and found everything entcrta^mg. It might be an old burial mound or a row of telegraph poles marching who knows where over the horizon, their wires whining mysteriously. Or they would see a far-away farm-house sunk in foliage, smeUing of dampness and hemp, and somehow felt that it was a happy home. Or they would see a horse's skeleton, bleached and lonely in the open country. Larks triUed furiously, quails caUed to each othcr and the corncrake's cry sounded as if someone was jerking an old iron latch.
At midday Olga and Sasha reached a large viUage. In the broad vilage street thcy ran across the little old man, Gencral Zhukov's cook, all hot, with his red, sweaty bald pate sh^^g in the sun. Olga and he did not recognize each other, but then both looked round to- gether and saw who it was and went their ways without a word. Stopping by a hut that looked newer and more prosperous than the others, Olga bowed in front of the open windows.
'Good Christian folk/ she chanted in a loud, shriU voice, 'alms for the love of Christ, of your charity, God rest the souls of your parents, may the Kingdom of Heaven be theirs.'
'Good Christian folk,' intoned Sasha, 'alms for the love of Christ, of your charity, the Kingdom of Heaven... .'
ANGEL
Miss Olga Plemyannikov, daughter. of a retired minor civil servant, sat brooding on the porch in her yard. She was hot, she was plagued by flies, she was glad it would soon be evening. Dark rain clouds were moving in from the east, and there were a few puffs of damp wind from the same quarter.
In the middle ofher yard stood Vanya Kukin. He waS in the enter- tainments business—he ran the Tivoli Pleasure Gardens—and he lived in a detached cottage in the grounds of Olga's house. He gazed up at the sky.
'Oh no, not again!' he said desperatelv. 'Not more rain! Why does it have to rain every single blessed day? This is the absolute limit! It'll be the ruin of me—such terrible losses every day!'
He threw up his arms.
'Such is our life, Miss,' he went on, addressing Olga. 'It's pathetic! You work, you do your best, you worry, you lie awake at night, you keep thinking how to improve things. But what happens? Take the audiences, to start with—ignorant savages! I give them the best operetta and pantomime, give them first-rate burlesque. But do they want it? Do they understand any of it? They want vulgar slapstick, that's what they want. And then, just look at this weather: rain nearly every evening. It started on May the tenth, and it's been at it the whole of May and June. It's an abomination! There are no audiences, but who has to pay the rent? Who pays the performers? Not me, I suppose, oh dear me no!'
Clouds gathered again late next afternoon.
'Oh, never mind, let it rain,' Kukin laughed hysterically. 'Let it swamp the whole Gardens, me included. May I enjoy no happiness in this world or the next! May the performers sue me! Better still, let them send me to Siberia: to hard labour! Even better, send me to the gallows, ha, ha, ha.'
It was just the same on the third day.
Olga listened to Kukin silently and seriously, occasional tears in her eyes, until his troubles moved her in the end, and she fell in love. He was a short, skinny, yellow-faced fellow with his hair combed back over his temples. He had a reedy, high-pitched voice, he twisted his mouth when he spoke, he always had a look of desperation. Yet he aroused deep and true emotion in her. She was always in love with someone—couldn't help it. Before this she had loved her father: an invalid, now, wheezing in his arm^hair in a darkened room. She had loved her aunt who came over from Bryansk to see her about once every two years. Earlier still, at j unior school, she had loved the French master. She was a quiet, good-hearted, sentimental, very healthy young lady with a tender, melting expression. Looking at her full, rosy cheeks, at her soft white neck with its dark birth-mark, at her kind, innocent smile whenever she heard good tidings—men thought she was 'a bit of all right'. They would smile too, while her lady guests couldn't resist suddenly clasping her hand when talking to her.