We might have taken Ludmilla with us; I could have drawn her along in a little cart.
But it was autumn. A damp wind blew up the streets, the sky was heavy with rain-clouds, the earth frowned. It had begun to look dirty and unhappy.
CHAPTER IV
ONCE more I was in the town, in a two-storied white house which reminded me of a coffin meant to hold a lot of people.
It was a new house, but it looked as if were in ill health, and was bloated like a beggar who has suddenly become rich and has over-eaten.
It stood sidewise to the street, and had eight windows to each floor, but where the face of the house ought to have been there were only four windows. The lower windows looked on a narrow passage and on the yard, and the upper windows on the laundress’s little house and the causeway.
No street, as I understood the term, existed. In front of the house a dirty causeway ran in two directions, cut in two by a narrow dike.
To the left, it extended to the House of Detention, and was heaped with rubbish and logs, and at the bottom stood a thick pool of dark-green filth. On the right, at the end of the causeway, the slimy Xvyexdin Pond stagnated. The middle of the causeway was exactly opposite the house, and half of it was strewn with filth and over-grown with nettles and horse sorrel, while in the other half the priest Doriedont Pokrovski had planted a garden in which was a summer-house of thin lathes painted red.
If one threw stones at it, the lathes split with a crackling sound.
The place was intolerably depressing and shamelessly dirty. The autumn had ruthlessly broken up the filthy, rotten earth, changing it into a sort of red resin which clung to one’s feet tenaciously.
I had never seen so much dirt in so small a space before, and after being accustomed to the cleanliness of the fields and forests, this corner of the town aroused my disgust.
Beyond the causeway stretched gray, broken-down fences, and in the distance I recognized the little house in which I had lived when I was shop-boy.
The nearness of that house depressed me still more.
I had known my master before; he and his brother used to be among mother’s visitors. His brother it was who had sung so comically:
“Andrei — papa, Andrei — papa — ”
They were not changed. The elder, with a hook nose and long hair, was pleasant in manner and seemed to be kind; the younger, Victor, had the same horse-like face and the same freckles.
Their mother, grandmother’s sister, was very cross and fault-finding.
The elder son was married. His wife was a splendid creature, white like bread made from Indian corn, with very large, dark eyes.
She said to me twice during the first day:
“I gave your mother a silk cloak trimmed with jet.”
Somehow I did not want to believe that she had given, and that my mother had accepted, a present.
When she reminded me of it again, I said:
“You gave it to her, and that is the end of the matter; there is nothing to boast about.”
She started away from me.
“Wh-a-at?
To whom are you speaking?”
Her face came out in red blotches, her eyes rolled, and she called her husband.
He came into the kitchen, with his compasses in his hand and a pencil behind his ear, listened to what his wife had to say, and then said to me:
“You must speak properly to her and to us all.
There must be no insolence.”
Then he said to his wife, impatiently,
“Don’t disturb me with your nonsense!”
“What do you mean — nonsense?
If your relatives — ”
“The devil take my relatives!” cried the master, rushing away.
I myself was not pleased to think that they were relatives of grandmother. Experience had taught me that relatives behave worse to one another than do strangers. Their gossip is more spiteful, since they know more of the bad and ridiculous sides of one another than strangers, and they fall out and fight more often.
I liked my master. He used to shake back his hair with a graceful movement, and tuck it behind his ears, and he reminded me somehow of “Good Business.”
He often laughed merrily; his gray eyes looked kindly upon me, and funny wrinkles played divertingly about his aquiline nose.
“You have abused each other long enough, wild fowl,” he would say to his mother and his wife, showing his small, closely set teeth in a gentle smile.
The mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law abused each other all day. I was surprised to see how swiftly and easily they plunged into a quarrel.
The first thing in the morning, with their hair unbrushed and their clothes unfastened, they would rush about the rooms as if the house were on fire, and they fussed about all day, only pausing to take breath in the dining-room at dinner, tea, or supper.
They ate and drank till they could eat and drink no more, and at dinner they talked about the food and disputed lethargically, preparing for a big quarrel.
No matter what it was that the mother-in-law had prepared, the daughter-in-law was sure to say:—
“My mother did not cook it this way.”
“Well, if that is so, she did it badly, that’s all.”
“On the contrary, she did it better.”
“Well, you had better go back to your mother.”
“I am mistress here.”
“And who am I?”
Here the master would intervene.