“That will do, wild fowl!
What is the matter with you? Are you mad?”
For some inexplicable reason everything about that house was peculiar and mirth-provoking. The way from the kitchen to the dining-room lay through a small closet, the only one in the house, through which they carried the samovar and the food into the dining-room. It was the cause of merry witticisms and often of laughable misunderstandings.
I slept in the kitchen, between that door and the one leading to the stairs. My head was hot from the heat of the cooking-stove, but the draft from the stairs blew on my feet. When I retired to bed, I used to take all the mats off the floor and wrap them round my feet.
The large reception-room, with its two pier-glasses, its pictures in gilt frames, its pair of card-tables, and its dozen Vienna chairs, was a dreary, depressing place.
The small drawing-room was simply packed with a medley of soft furniture, with wedding presents, silver articles, and a tea-service. It was adorned with three lamps, one larger than the other two.
In the dark, windowless bedroom, in addition to the wide bed, there were trunks and cupboards from which came the odors of leaf tobacco and Persian camomile.
These three rooms were always unoccupied, while the entire household squeezed itself into the little dining-room.
Directly after breakfast, at eight o’clock, the master and his brother moved the table, and, laying sheets of white paper upon it, with cases, pencils, and saucers containing Indian ink, set to work, one at each end of the table.
The table was shaky, and took up nearly the whole of the room, and when the mistress and the nurse came out of the nursery they had to brush past the corners.
“Don’t come fussing about here!” Victor would cry.
“Vassia, please tell him not to shout at me,” the mistress would say to her husband in an offended tone.
“All right; but don’t come and shake the table,” her husband would reply peaceably.
“I am stout, and the room is so small.”
“Well, we will go and work in the large drawing-room.”
But at that she cried indignantly:
“Lord! why on earth should you work in the large drawing-room?”
At the door of the closet appeared the angry face of Matrena Ivanovna, flushed with the heat of the stove. She called out:
“You see how it is, Vassia? She knows that you are working, and yet she can’t be satisfied with the other four rooms.”
Victor laughed maliciously, but the master said:
“That will do!”
And the daughter-in-law, with a venomously eloquent gesture, sank into a chair and groaned:
“I am dying!
I am dying!”
“Don’t hinder my work, the devil take you!” roared the master, turning pale with the exertion.
“This is nothing better than a mad-house. Here am I breaking my back to feed you.
Oh, you wild fowl!”
At first these quarrels used to alarm me, especially when the mistress, seizing a table knife, rushed into the closet, and, shutting both the doors, began to shriek like a mad thing.
For a minute the house was quiet, then the master, having tried to force the door, stooped down, and called out to me:
“Climb up on my back and unfasten the hook.”
I swiftly jumped on his back, and broke the pane of glass over the door; but when I bent down, the mistress hit me over the head with the blade of the knife.
However, I succeeded in opening the door, and the master, dragging his wife into the dining-room after a struggle, took the knife away from her.
As I sat in the kitchen rubbing my bruised head, I soon came to the conclusion that I had suffered for nothing. The knife was so blunt that it would hardly cut a piece of bread, and it would certainly never have made an incision in any one’s skin. Besides, there had been no need for me to climb on the master’s back. I could have broken the glass by standing on a chair, and in any case it would have been easier for a grown person to have unfastened the hook, since his arms would have been longer.
After that episode the quarrels in the house ceased to alarm me.
The brothers used to sing in the church choir; sometimes they used to sing softly over their work. The elder would begin in a baritone:
“The ring, which was the maiden’s heart, I cast from me into the sea.”
And the younger would join with his tenor:
“And I with that very ring Her earthly joy did ruin.”
The mistress would murmur from the nursery:
“Have you gone out of your minds?
Baby is asleep,” or:
“How can you, Vassia, a married man, be singing about girls?
Besides, the bell will ring for vespers in a minute.”
“What’s the matter now? We are only singing a church tune.”
But the mistress intimated that it was out ox place to sing church tunes here, there, and everywhere. Besides, and she pointed eloquently to the little door.
“We shall have to change our quarters, or the devil knows what will become of us,” said the master.
He said just as often that he must get another table, and he said it for three years in succession.
When I listened to my employers talking about people, I was always reminded of the boot-shop. They used to talk in the same way there.
It was evident to me that my present masters also thought themselves better than any one in the town. They knew the rules of correct conduct to the minutest detail, and, guided by these rules, which were not at all clear to me, they judged others pitilessly and unsparingly.
This sitting in judgment aroused in me a ferocious resentment and anger against the laws of my employers, and the breaking of those laws became a source of pleasure to me.