though I should have to apologize to all of you for having been at the University,” said Olga Mihalovna sharply. “Listen, uncle. If people played the same scales over and over again the whole day long in your hearing, you wouldn’t be able to sit still and listen, but would run away. I hear the same thing over again for days together all the year round. You must have pity on me at last.”
Her uncle pulled a very long face, then looked at her searchingly and twisted his lips into a mocking smile.
“So that’s how it is,” he piped in a voice like an old woman’s. “I beg your pardon!” he said, and made a ceremonious bow. “If you have fallen under his influence yourself, and have abandoned your convictions, you should have said so before. I beg your pardon!”
“Yes, I have abandoned my convictions,” she cried. “There; make the most of it!”
“I beg your pardon!”
Her uncle for the last time made her a ceremonious bow, a little on one side, and, shrinking into himself, made a scrape with his foot and walked back.
“Idiot!” thought Olga Mihalovna. “I hope he will go home.”
She found the ladies and the young people among the raspberries in the kitchen garden. Some were eating raspberries; others, tired of eating raspberries, were strolling about the strawberry beds or foraging among the sugar-peas. A little on one side of the raspberry bed, near a branching appletree propped up by posts which had been pulled out of an old fence, Pyotr Dmitritch was mowing the grass. His hair was falling over his forehead, his cravat was untied. His watch-chain was hanging loose. Every step and every swing of the scythe showed skill and the possession of immense physical strength. Near him were standing Lubotchka and the daughters of a neighbour, Colonel Bukryeev—two anaemic and unhealthily stout fair girls, Natalya and Valentina, or, as they were always called, Nata and Vata, both wearing white frocks and strikingly like each other. Pyotr Dmitritch was teaching them to mow.
“It’s very simple,” he said. “You have only to know how to hold the scythe and not to get too hot over it—that is, not to use more force than is necessary! Like this. … Wouldn’t you like to try?” he said, offering the scythe to Lubotchka. “Come!”
Lubotchka took the scythe clumsily, blushed crimson, and laughed.
“Don’t be afraid, Lubov Alexandrovna!” cried Olga Mihalovna, loud enough for all the ladies to hear that she was with them. “Don’t be afraid! You must learn! If you marry a Tolstoyan he will make you mow.”
Lubotchka raised the scythe, but began laughing again, and, helpless with laughter, let go of it at once. She was ashamed and pleased at being talked to as though grown up. Nata, with a cold, serious face, with no trace of smiling or shyness, took the scythe, swung it and caught it in the grass; Vata, also without a smile, as cold and serious as her sister, took the scythe, and silently thrust it into the earth. Having done this, the two sisters linked arms and walked in silence to the raspberries.
Pyotr Dmitritch laughed and played about like a boy, and this childish, frolicsome mood in which he became exceedingly good-natured suited him far better than any other. Olga Mihalovna loved him when he was like that. But his boyishness did not usually last long. It did not this time; after playing with the scythe, he for some reason thought it necessary to take a serious tone about it.
“When I am mowing, I feel, do you know, healthier and more normal,” he said. “If I were forced to confine myself to an intellectual life I believe I should go out of my mind. I feel that I was not born to be a man of culture! I ought to mow, plough, sow, drive out the horses.”
And Pyotr Dmitritch began a conversation with the ladies about the advantages of physical labour, about culture, and then about the pernicious effects of money, of property. Listening to her husband, Olga Mihalovna, for some reason, thought of her dowry.
“And the time will come, I suppose,” she thought, “when he will not forgive me for being richer than he. He is proud and vain. Maybe he will hate me because he owes so much to me.”
She stopped near Colonel Bukryeev, who was eating raspberries and also taking part in the conversation.
“Come,” he said, making room for Olga Mihalovna and Pyotr Dmitritch. “The ripest are here. … And so, according to Proudhon,” he went on, raising his voice, “property is robbery. But I must confess I don’t believe in Proudhon, and don’t consider him a philosopher. The French are not authorities, to my thinking—God bless them!”
“Well, as for Proudhons and Buckles and the rest of them, I am weak in that department,” said Pyotr Dmitritch. “For philosophy you must apply to my wife. She has been at University lectures and knows all your Schopenhauers and Proudhons by heart. …”
Olga Mihalovna felt bored again. She walked again along a little path by apple and pear trees, and looked again as though she was on some very important errand. She reached the gardener’s cottage. In the doorway the gardener’s wife, Varvara, was sitting together with her four little children with big shaven heads. Varvara, too, was with child and expecting to be confined on Elijah’s Day. After greeting her, Olga Mihalovna looked at her and the children in silence and asked:
“Well, how do you feel?”
“Oh, all right. …”
A silence followed. The two women seemed to understand each other without words.
“It’s dreadful having one’s first baby,” said Olga Mihalovna after a moment’s thought. “I keep feeling as though I shall not get through it, as though I shall die.”
“I fancied that, too, but here I am alive. One has all sorts of fancies.”
Varvara, who was just going to have her fifth, looked down a little on her mistress from the height of her experience and spoke in a rather didactic tone, and Olga Mihalovna could not help feeling her authority; she would have liked to have talked of her fears, of the child, of her sensations, but she was afraid it might strike Varvara as naïve and trivial. And she waited in silence for Varvara to say something herself.
“Olya, we are going indoors,” Pyotr Dmitritch called from the raspberries.
Olga Mihalovna liked being silent, waiting and watching Varvara. She would have been ready to stay like that till night without speaking or having any duty to perform. But she had to go. She had hardly left the cottage when Lubotchka, Nata, and Vata came running to meet her. The sisters stopped short abruptly a couple of yards away; Lubotchka ran right up to her and flung herself on her neck.
“You dear, darling, precious,” she said, kissing her face and her neck. “Let us go and have tea on the island!”
“On the island, on the island!” said the precisely similar Nata and Vata, both at once, without a smile.
“But it’s going to rain, my dears.”
“It’s not, it’s not,” cried Lubotchka with a woebegone face. “They’ve all agreed to go. Dear! darling!”
“They are all getting ready to have tea on the island,” said Pyotr Dmitritch, coming up. “See to arranging things. … We will all go in the boats, and the samovars and all the rest of it must be sent in the carriage with the servants.”
He walked beside his wife and gave her his arm. Olga Mihalovna had a desire to say something disagreeable to her husband, something biting, even about her dowry perhaps—the crueller the better, she felt. She thought a little, and said:
“Why is it Count Alexey Petrovitch hasn’t come? What a pity!”
“I am very glad he hasn’t come,” said Pyotr Dmitritch, lying. “I’m sick to death of that old lunatic.”
“But yet before dinner you were expecting him so eagerly!”
III