Forty Stories - Anton Chekhov [85]
Dyudya was sitting on the steps in his waistcoat, without a cap, waiting for a word from the stranger. He liked to listen in the evenings to travelers telling all kinds of stories as a preparation for sleep, and this had been his custom for some time. His old wife, Afanasyevna, and his daughter-in-law Sophia were milking in the cowshed, while Varvara, the other daughter-in-law, sat upstairs by an open window, eating sunflower seeds.
“I reckon that little fellow must be your son,” Dyudya asked the stranger.
“Well, no. Adopted. An orphan. I took him up for the salvation of my soul.”
They got to talking. The stranger seemed to be a talkative man with a gift for speech, and Dyudya learned that he belonged to the lower middle class, came from the town, owned his own house, and went by the name of Matvey Savvich. He was on his way to inspect some gardens he was renting from some German colonists. The name of the boy was Kuzka. The evening was hot and close, and no one wanted to sleep. When it grew dark and the pale stars were twinkling in the sky, Matvey Savvich began to tell the story of how he had taken up with Kuzka. Afanasyevna and Sophia stood a little way off, listening. Kuzka was away by the gate.
“It’s a complicated story, grandfather—extraordinarily so,” Matvey began. “If I told you everything that happened, it would take all night. Ten years ago in our street, in a little house next to mine, where there’s now a candle factory and a creamery, there used to live an old widow, Marfa Semyonovna Kapluntsev, with her two sons. One was a conductor on the railroad, and the other, Vasya, was a boy of my own age, and he lived at home with his mother. The widow’s husband had kept horses, five pairs of them, and he used to send his drivers all over town. The widow continued the business, and she was just as good at managing the drivers as her husband, and so there were days when they made a clear five-ruble profit. The young fellow, too, was making a bit of money. He bred prize pigeons and sold them to the fanciers. I remember him standing on the roof, throwing up a broom and whistling, and the pigeons were high in the sky, but not high enough for him—he wanted them to go higher. Greenfinches and starlings, too, he caught, and he knew how to make good cages.… All pretty trifling maybe, but a man can make ten rubles a month from trifles like that. Well, time went on, the old woman lost the use of her legs and took to her bed. Consequently the house had no woman to look after it, and that’s about as good as being blind in both eyes! So the old lady bestirred herself and made up her mind to get Vasya married. They called in a matchmaker at once, and then the old women got to talking and our Vasya went off to look at the girls. He picked on Mashenka, the widow Samokhvalikha’s daughter. They didn’t waste any time: they decided to get married on the spot, and in a week all arrangements were made. She was quite young, just seventeen, very thin, knee-high to a grasshopper, with a pale pretty-looking face, and all the qualities of a young lady, and the dowry was good, too, amounting to five hundred rubles, a cow, and a bed.… But the old lady knew what was in store, and on the third day after the wedding she departed unto the heavenly Jerusalem where there is neither sickness nor sighing. The young ones had masses said for her soul, and they began to live. Things went splendidly for six months, and then suddenly another misfortune occurred. It never rains but it pours. Vasya was summoned to draw lots as a conscript. Poor fellow, they made a soldier out of him, and they gave him no exemptions. They shaved his head and packed him off to the kingdom of Poland. It was God’s will, there was nothing to be done about it. When he said good-by to his wife in the courtyard he was all right until he looked up at the pigeons in the hayloft for