Forty Stories - Anton Chekhov [129]
Voices kept shouting confusedly: “Did you hear that, Kuzma?” “What’s up, eh?” “Lord save us!” “Ivan Dementyich, I’ll get you!” “Look there, brother!”
A very small pock-marked peasant with a black beard, quite drunk, was suddenly surprised by something or other, and exploded into a torrent of foul language.
“What do you mean by all that dirty language, eh?” Semyon shouted angrily. He was sitting at the far end of the room. “Can’t you see there’s a young lady present?”
“What’s that, a young lady, eh?” someone jeered from another corner.
“What a swine!”
“I didn’t mean any harm,” the very small peasant said confusedly. “Excuse me. I lays down my money, and the young lady lays hers. Good morning, ma’am.”
“Good morning,” replied the schoolteacher.
“Very well, thank you kindly.”
Maria Vasilyevna enjoyed her tea, and soon her face was as red as the others, and once more she fell to thinking about the janitor, about firewood.…
She heard a voice from the next table: “Just look over there, brother. That’s the schoolmistress from Vyazovye. I recognize her. She’s a fine young lady.…”
“She’s all right.”
The swing door was continually banging, and people were continually coming in and going out. Maria Vasilyevna sat there absorbed in her thoughts, but the accordion on the other side of the wall kept playing and playing. Patches of sunlight which had lain on the floor when she came in moved up to the counter, then up the wall, and then vanished altogether: it meant it was now afternoon. The peasants at the next table were getting ready to go. The very small peasant went up to Maria Vasilyevna, swaying slightly. He thrust out his hand; and seeing him, all the other peasants came up to her and shook hands and went out one by one. The door banged and whined nine times.
“Vasilyevna, get ready!” Semyon called to her.
They drove away, and again the horse went at a walking pace.
“A while back they were building a school here in their Nizhneye Gorodishche,” said Semyon, turning round. “And they did something wicked.”
“What did they do?”
“The chairman put a thousand in his pocket, and the trustee put a thousand, and the teacher put five hundred.”
“You shouldn’t slander people, grandfather. The whole school only cost a thousand. It’s all nonsense what you say!”
“I wouldn’t know.… I’m only telling you what they tell me.”
It was quite clear that Semyon did not believe the schoolmistress. The peasants, too, did not believe her. They always thought her salary was too large, twenty-one rubles a month-five rubles, in their estimation, would have been sufficient—and they thought she kept the greater part of the money she received for firewood and for the janitor. The trustee thought like the rest, though he made a profit out of the firewood and received a salary from the peasants for acting as trustee, and all this in secret without the knowledge of the authorities.
But now, thank God, they had left the forest behind them, and it was level ground all the way to Vyazovye. They had only a little further to go—a river to cross, then a railroad track, and then they would be in Vyazovye.
“Where are you going now?” Maria Vasilyevna asked Semyon. “Why don’t you take the road to the right across the bridge?”
“What’s wrong with this road? The water’s not very deep.”
“Be careful you don’t drown the horse!”
“What’s that?”
“Why, there’s Khanov driving over the bridge,” Maria Vasilyevna said, seeing the carriage and four horses far to the right. “It is him, isn’t it?”
“It’s him for sure. Reckon he didn’t find Bakvist at home after all. God in heaven, he’s a fool to drive all that way, when it’s all of two miles nearer this way.”
They came to the river. In summer the river was only a shallow stream which you could walk across easily. Usually in August it was dried up, but now, after the spring floods, it had grown to be a torrent of swift, cold, muddy water fifty feet wide. There were