"I suppose he was afraid."
"Afraid? I'll teach him to be afraid.
I'll make him come here from Moscow, and the moment he comes I'll have him drafted into the army.
He was afraid!"
Although on the decline, serfdom still existed.
Anton Vasilyev had known his mistress to impose the most peculiar punishments, but, even so, her present decision was so unexpected that it made him miserable.
He thought of his nickname Telltale.
Ivan Mikhailov was an upright peasant, and Anton never dreamed that misfortune would touch him.
Besides, Ivan Mikhailov was his friend and godfather. Now, all of a sudden, he was to be made a soldier just because he, Anton Vasilyev, the Telltale, could not hold his tongue.
"Forgive him—Ivan Mikhailov, I mean," he pleaded.
"Go away, you mollycoddler," she shouted in a voice so loud that he lost all desire to intercede any further for his friend.
_____ CHAPTER II
Arina Petrovna was sixty years old, still of sound health and accustomed to have her own way in everything.
Her manner was severe. She lived alone, and managed the huge Golovliov estate all by herself, without having to answer to any one else. She calculated closely, almost parsimoniously, was not intimate with her neighbors, was gracious to the local authorities, and exacted implicit obedience from her children. They were not to do anything without first asking themselves, "What would mamenka say about it?"
She was independent, inflexible, even stubborn, though her stubbornness was not so much native as due chiefly to the circumstance that there was not one person in the whole Golovliov family that could oppose her.
Her husband was a trifling creature, and drank. Arina Petrovna used to say of herself that she was neither a widow nor a married woman. Some of the children were in St. Petersburg, the others took after their father and were relegated to the class of "horrid creatures," who were unfit for household duties.
In these circumstances Arina Petrovna soon began to feel all left alone, and grew totally disaccustomed to family life, although the word "family" was constantly on her lips, and outwardly she seemed to be exclusively guided in all her work by the desire to build up the family estate and keep the family affairs in order.
The head of the family, Vladimir Mikhailych Golovliov, was known from his youth as a dissolute, quarrelsome fellow, with nothing in his character that would be sympathetic to a serious, active woman like Arina Petrovna.
He led a lazy, good-for-nothing existence, usually stayed locked up in his room, where he imitated the warble of the starlings, the crowing of cocks, and the like, and composed ribald doggerel.
In bursts of confidence he would boast that he had been a friend of the poet Barkov, intimating that the poet had blessed him on his deathbed.
Arina Petrovna disliked her husband's verses from the very first. "Nasty stuff!" "Trash!" she called them. And since Vladimir Mikhailych's very object in marrying had been to have someone ever at hand to listen to his poetry, the result was that quarrels soon began, which grew worse and worse and more frequent until they ended with Arina Petrovna utterly indifferent and contemptuous of her clown husband, and Vladimir Mikhailych hating his wife sincerely, with a hatred considerably mixed with fear.
The husband called the wife a "hag" and a "devil"; the wife called the husband a "windmill" and a "balalaika without strings."
They lived together in this way for more than forty years, and it never occurred to either of them that there was anything unnatural in such a life.
Time did not diminish Vladimir Mikhailych's quarrelsomeness; on the contrary, it took on a still sharper edge.
Apart from the poetical exercising in Barkov's spirit that he did, he began to drink and to lie in wait eagerly for the servant girls in the corridors.
At first Arina Petrovna looked on this new occupation of her husband's with repugnance. She even got wrought up over it, not so much from jealousy as that she felt it to be an interference with her authority. After a while, however, she shrugged her shoulders, and merely watched out that the "dirty wenches" should not fetch brandy for their master.
From that time on, having said to herself once for all that her husband was not a companion, she directed her efforts exclusively to one object, the building up of the estate. And in the forty years of her married life she actually succeeded in multiplying her property tenfold.
With astonishing patience and acumen she kept her eye on the near and distant villages, found out in secret ways the relations that existed between the neighboring landowners and the board of trustees, and always appeared at the auctions like snow on the head.
In this fantastic hunt for new acquisitions Vladimir Mikhailych receded more and more into the background, turned seedy and at last dropped out of social life completely.
He was now a decrepit old man already, keeping his bed almost the whole time. On the rare occasions that he left his room it was only to stick his head through the half-open door of his wife's bedroom and shout:
"Devil!" After which he would go back and close himself up in his own room again.
Arina Petrovna was not much happier in her children.
She was of a celibate nature, so to speak, independent and self-sufficient, and her children were nothing to her but a useless burden.
The only times when she breathed freely was when she was alone with her accounts and her household affairs, and when no one interfered with her business talks with her managers, stewards, housekeepers, and so on.
In her eyes, children were one of the preordained things in life that she felt she had no right to protest against. Nevertheless they did not touch a single chord in her inner being, which was given over wholly to the numberless details of the household.
There were four children, one daughter and three sons.
Of the oldest son and the daughter she did not even like to speak; toward the youngest son she was indifferent. It was only for the middle one, Porfisha, that she cherished any feeling at all, a feeling not of love, but of something very akin to fear.
Stepan Vladimirych, the oldest son, passed in the family by the name of Simple Simon, or The Saucebox.
He was very young when he was put into the class of "horrid creatures," and from childhood up played the role of half pariah, half clown.
Unfortunately he was a bright child, susceptible to the impressions of his environment.
From his father he inherited an irresistible inclination to play tricks, from his mother the ability to divine the weak sides of people's natures.
The first characteristic soon made him his father's favorite, which still further intensified his mother's dislike of him.
Often when the mother was absent on business, the father and the boy would betake themselves into the study adorned with the portrait of Barkov, read ribald poems, and gossip, the chief butt of their raillery being the "hag," that is to say, Arina Petrovna.
The "hag," instinctively divining their occupation, would drive up to the front steps very quietly, then tiptoe to the study door and listen to their fun-making.
The murderous punishment of Simple Simon followed swift and cruel.
But Stiopka was not subdued. He was impervious either to blows or to admonitions, and in half an hour was back again at his tricks.
He would cut up Aniutka's, the servant girl's, scarf, or he would stick flies into Vasiutka's mouth while he slept, or he would run into the kitchen and carry off a cake (Arina Petrovna kept her children half hungry), which he always divided with his brothers.
"You ought to be killed," his mother said. "I'll kill you, and I won't have to answer for it either.
Even God won't punish me for it."
This humiliation, constantly put upon a nature soft, yielding and forgetful, did not remain without its effect.