She found the ladies and young people among the raspberry canes in the kitchen garden. Some were eating the raspberries, while others who had had their fill were wandering among the strawberry beds or nosing around in the sugar-peas. Just to one side of the raspberry canes, near a spreading apple tree that was propped up on all sides by stakes pulled out of an old fence, Pyotr was scything the grass. His hair was hanging over his forehead, his tie had come undone, his watch-chain was dangling loose. Every step he took, every sweep of the scythe showed skill and enormous physical strength. Near him stood Lyubochka, with their neighbour Colonel Bukreyev’s daughters Natalya and Valentina – or, as everyone called them, Nata and Vata, anaemic and unhealthy, plump blondes of about sixteen or seventeen in white dresses and strikingly alike. Pyotr was teaching them to scythe.
‘It’s very simple,’ he was saying. ‘All you have to know is how to hold the scythe and to take it calmly – I mean, not exerting yourself more than you need. Like this… Would you like to try now?’ he asked, offering the scythe to Lyubochka. ‘Come on!’
Lyubochka awkwardly took the scythe then suddenly blushed and burst out laughing.
‘Don’t be shy, Lyubochka,’ Olga shouted, loud enough for all the ladies to hear and know that she had returned to them. ‘Don’t be shy. You have to learn. Marry a Tolstoyan, he’ll make you wield the scythe.’
Lyubochka raised the scythe but burst out laughing again, which so weakened her she immediately put it down. She was both embarrassed and pleased that she was being spoken to like an adult. Nata, without smiling or showing any shyness, picked up the scythe with a serious, cold look, took a sweep and got it tangled up in the grass. Without smiling either, as serious and cold-looking as her sister, Vata silently picked up the scythe and plunged it into the earth. These operations completed, the sisters took each other by the arm and silently walked over to the raspberry canes.
Pyotr laughed and joked like a small boy, and this mischievous, childish mood, when he became excessively good-humoured, suited him far more than anything else. Olga loved him that way. But the boyish behaviour did not usually last long, which was the case this time. Having had his little joke he thought that he should introduce a note of seriousness into his playfulness.
‘When I use a scythe I feel healthier, a more normal person, I can tell you,’ he said. ‘If you tried to force me to be satisfied solely with the life of the mind and nothing else I think I would go mad. I feel that I was not born for the cultural life! I should be reaping, ploughing, sowing, training horses.’
Pyotr started talking to the ladies about the advantages of physical labour, about culture, then turned to the harmfulness of money, to landed property. As she listened to her husband, for some reason Olga thought of her dowry.
‘Surely the time will come,’ Olga thought, ‘when he won’t be able to forgive me for being the richer. He’s proud and touchy. Perhaps he’ll come to hate me because of his great debt towards me.’
She stopped by Colonel Bukreyev, who was eating raspberries while participating in the conversation.
‘Please join us,’ he said, stepping to one side for Olga and Pyotr. ‘The ripest ones are over here. And so, in Proudhon’s2 opinion,’ he went on, raising his voice, ‘property is theft. But I must confess that I don’t accept Proudhon and don’t rate him as a philosopher. As far as I’m concerned the French are not authorities on the matter, blast them!’
‘Well, I’m a bit weak on my Proudhons and Buckles,’3 Pyotr said. ‘If you want to discuss philosophy, then my wife’s the one. She’s been to university lectures and knows all these Schopenhauers4 and Proudhons backwards.’
Olga felt bored again. Once more she went down the garden along the narrow path, past the apple and pear trees, and again she appeared to be on some very important mission… Here was the gardener’s cottage. Barbara, the gardener’s wife, and her four small boys, with their big, close-cropped heads, were sitting in the doorway.
Barbara was pregnant too and the baby was due, according to her calculations, by Elijah’s Day. After greeting her, Olga silently surveyed her and the children and asked, ‘Well, how are you feeling?’
‘Oh, all right.’
Silence followed. It seemed that both women understood each other without the need for words. Olga pondered for a moment and then said, ‘It’s terribly frightening having your first baby. I keep thinking that I won’t get through it, that I’ll die…’
‘I thought that, but I’m still alive. You can worry about anything if you want to.’
Barbara, who was pregnant for the fifth time and a woman of experience, was rather condescending to her mistress and seemed to be lecturing her as she spoke, and Olga could not help sensing her authoritarian tone. She wanted to talk about her fears, the child, her sensations, but she was scared Barbara might think this trivial and naïve. And so she remained silent, waiting for Barbara to say something.
‘Olga, let’s go back to the house!’ Pyotr shouted from the raspberry canes.
Olga liked waiting in silence and watching Barbara. She would have willingly stood there silently until night-time, although there was no need to. But she had to move on. The moment she left the cottage Lyubochka, Vata and Nata came running towards her. The two sisters stopped about two yards away, as if rooted to the spot, but Lyubochka ran and threw herself round Olga’s neck.
‘My dear, my darling, my precious!’ she said, kissing her face and neck. ‘Let’s go and have tea on the island.’
‘The island, the island!’ echoed the identical, unsmiling Vata and Nata simultaneously.
‘But it’s going to rain, my dears.’
‘It’s not, it’s not!’ Lyubochka shouted, making a tearful face. ‘Everyone wants to go, my dearest, my treasure!’
‘Everyone’s decided to have tea on the island,’ Pyotr said, coming up to them. ‘Now you make the arrangements… we’ll all go in the rowing-boats, and the samovars and everything else can follow with the servants in the carriage.’
He took his wife by the arm and walked along with her. Olga wanted to tell her husband something nasty, hurtful – about the dowry even – and the more bluntly the better, she thought. But she pondered for a moment and said, ‘Why hasn’t Count Aleksey come? What a shame.’
‘I’m only too pleased he hasn’t,’ Pyotr lied. ‘I’m sick and tired of that old fool.’
‘But before lunch you just couldn’t wait for him to come!’
III
Half an hour later the guests were crowding along the bank near the posts where the boats were moored. There was much talk and laughter and so much unnecessary fuss that all the seating went wrong. Three boats were full to overflowing, while two others stood empty. The keys for these boats had been mislaid and people ran incessantly from river to house in search of them. Some said that Grigory had them, others said that they were with the estate manager, others thought it would be a good idea to send for the blacksmith to break the locks. And everyone spoke at once, interrupting and drowning each others’ voices. Pyotr impatiently paced along the bank shouting, ‘what the hell’s going on here? The keys should always be kept on the windowsill in the hall. Who dared take them away? The manager can get his own boat if he likes.’
In the end the keys were found. Then they discovered that they were two oars short. Once again there was a loud commotion. Pyotr, tired of walking up and down, jumped into a kind of long, narrow canoe hollowed out from a poplar and pushed off so hard he nearly fell into the water. One after the other, the boats followed amid loud laughter and screams from the young ladies.
The white, cloudy sky, the trees along the bank, the reeds and the boats with people and oars were mirrored in the water; deep down under the boats, in that bottomless abyss, was a different sky, where birds flew. The bank where the estate was rose high and steep, and was densely wooded, while the other sloped gently, with green meadows and gleaming inlets. After the boats had travelled about a hundred yards, cottages and a herd of cows appeared from behind the willows which sadly leant over the gently sloping bank. Now they could hear songs, drunken shouts and the sound of an accordion.